A group of surrendered Maoists are busy making fountains from bamboos and growing vegetation on the premises of the Gondia police headquarters in Maharashtra.

Among them is 42-year-old Vinod Ramaswamy alias Anil Nagpure alias Vikas alias Anant. A native of Karimnagar district in Telangana, Anant was a high-ranking leader of the Maharashtra-Madhya Pradesh-Chhattisgarh (MMC) zone of the banned CPI Maoist.

Anant speaks various languages fluently, mainly English, Hindi, Marathi, Telugu, Chhattisgarhi and Gondi. Police said Anant is fond of reading and enriching his knowledge on various social and political issues. His name cropped up in many Naxal cases, but was never arrested in the past, police said.

Responding to the government’s deadline for Maoists to surrender before March 31 this year, Anant and 10 others put down their arms in Gondia in November last year.

Speaking to The Indian Express, Anant said he now wants to study, be a lawyer and work with NGOs, to provide legal aid to poor people struggling to get justice. “I am not sure how it will happen. But I want to do LLB. There are issues as I don’t even have an Aadhaar card…,” he said.

Like his father, Anant joined the Naxal movement at the age of 14 and has worked with top Maoist leaders Anuradha Ghandy (who passed away in 2008) and Milind Teltumbde (gunned down by the police in November 2021). Anant’s father initially worked in Dubai and at a mill in Mumbai for a few years, but later became motivated to join the Naxal outfit People’s War Group in Andhra Pradesh.

“To escape the mental torture by police who often questioned my mother about his whereabouts, our family went underground and formed a secret den in Aurangabad (now Chhatrapati Sambhaji Nagar) and Kolhapur as per party’s directions,” he said.

“Killing of senior Naxal leaders Shyam, Mahesh and Murali (in 1999) impacted my parents severely. They surrendered in Hyderabad in 2001. But I remained active in the Naxal movement as a student in Mumbai’s Ramniranjan Jhunjhunwala College with my real identity Vinod Ramaswamy. I wanted to do science, but was asked to take up Arts, so that I can give more time for party work,” he said.

“I was in Mumbai between 1999 and 2002. To evade the police after my family surrendered, I left Mumbai when I was in BA second year, and took admission in Class 11 at Dhanwate National College in Nagpur with a fake name Anil Nagpure, using a forged Class X pass document provided by Milind Teltumbde. I could not graduate. Within four years, I quit college in Nagpur and was deployed with armed cadres in jungles, but continued self-study,” he said.

Anant said he used to have a “photographic memory”. “After reading my answer sheet, a history teacher felt I had copied in the examination. The teacher then asked me to read the content and write it after a few hours. He was left amazed by the way I recollected the details word to word… But, I won’t be that accurate now,” he said.

Anant remembers how some youngsters from Nagpur, like Sushma Ramteke, got influenced by him and joined the banned Maoist group, but later got arrested by the police.

He also shared his experience with Santosh Shelar alias Painter, hailing from a slum in Pune city and a member of Kabir Kala Manch (KKM) cultural group, who was allegedly indoctrinated to join the armed Naxal movement in jungles. Shelar was arrested when he came to meet his family in Pune in 2024.

Anant said Shelar worked with him in the MMC zone. “Shelar used to share his problems with me. As I came from an urban region, I understood his issues. He could have done wonders for the party with his exceptionally good painting skills. But fellow cadres from rural backgrounds judged him on the basis of his weak physical work in the forests. It led to arguments and he left the jungles…”

“Even my talent was not utilised much in rural parts. I sincerely performed all responsibilities given by the party (in jungles), but I may have given more results for the Maoist movement in urban areas,” he said.

Anant said he is among those Maoists who believe that armed rebellion has lost its relevance. “It was relevant at one point of time. But now, the armed movement was not getting public support. Revolution means forming a public opinion and it is not possible without reaching the masses. Armed struggle restricted us. So we now aim to work among the masses, continue the struggle against injustice in a Constitutional framework,” he said.

Asked about future plans, Anant said there has been no discussion yet with other surrendered Maoist leaders about it. “We need to focus on complicated problems like casteism and other critical issues,” he said.

His sister, accused in a Maoist case in Gujarat in 2009, and a brother is a resident of Mumbai. “I had no contact with my family for 20 years. My mother came to meet me from Telangana after I surrendered,” he said.