The highest-ranking member of the Communist Party of India (Maoist), Thippiri Tirupathi alias Devuji, has surrendered in Telangana along with 20 other Maoist cadres, two highly-placed sources said.

The surrender has come ahead of a March 31 deadline set by Union Home Minister Amit Shah to bring the Maoist movement to an end in the country. Security forces stepped up anti-Maoist operations in 2024, particularly in Chhattisgarh, where at least 520 Maoists have been killed since then, including CPI (Maoist) general secretary Nambala Keshava Rao alias Basavaraju. Several top leaders and hundreds of cadres have also surrendered in different states during this period, including Politburo member Mallojula Venugopal Rao alias Sonu, who was considered the ideological head of the Maoist party.

A top source said on Sunday that police would officially provide an update on Devuji’s surrender by Monday or Tuesday. The source said Devuji and another Maoist leader, Raji Reddy, contacted the Telangana Police and that “they are with us at present”.

“Their presence here in Telangana has nothing to do with the ongoing operation in Chhattisgarh. It is the result of the Telangana Police’s outreach to get them to surrender,” the source said.

Some intelligence sources said Devuji, also known as Devji, may have been elevated to the top-most post of general secretary of the Maoist party after Basavaraju’s killing in May last year. The Maoist party has, however, denied this.

From Jagtial in Telangana, Devuji is now 62 years old and carries a bounty of Rs 1 crore.

“In the history of the party, there is no other leader of this rank who has surrendered,” a top intelligence source said.

For the past two decades, he had headed the Central Military Commission of the CPI (Maoist). In 2000, he created the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army, the armed unit of the Maoist party.

Devuji is from the Madiga Dalit community. “Tirupathi’s leadership could have been pivotal because he comes from a marginalised background and could have rallied the party’s cadre, including the Adivasis,” a top state intelligence officer said.

However, by the time he became the highest-ranking active Maoist leader last year, the party was severely weakened and split down the middle. “There was a two-line rift in the party with those supporting Mallojula Venugopal believing that the Maoists should surrender to save the party, and those supporting Devuji asserting that they would remain in the forests for the rest of their lives to put up a fight,” an intelligence source said.

Devuji is believed to have joined the Maoist party in the 1980s, when it was still known as the People’s War Group (PWG). PWG and the Maoist Communist Centre merged in 2004 to form the present-day Maoist party. “He was part of the Radical Students Union (RSU), which was the students’ wing of the banned outfit,” an intelligence official said.

According to Telangana intelligence sources, the Maoist party now has an armed cadre strength of just 180, who carry sophisticated weapons. In January 2024, this number was 2,200.

The cadre base of the party is supported by a militia base of 1,000 people. “In 2022, the militia was 7,000 in number,” an intelligence official said. The strength of the banned outfit has fallen manifold by 1/10th of its original size, a Telangana intelligence official had earlier told The Indian Express.

(With inputs from Sreenivas Janyala)