By Dhruv Tikekar, Rhea Mogul, CNN
(CNN) — Outgunned, outnumbered and on borrowed time, Papa Rao emerged from the jungle of central India wearing a faded checkered shirt, dusty trousers and scuffed sports shoes. He had a rifle slung over his shoulder and a $26,000 bounty on his head.
Behind him, in single file, trailed a troop of men and women carrying decades-old L1A1 and Lee-Enfield rifles. In sandals, and carrying Puma-branded sports backpacks, this group were some of the world’s last Maoist rebels, heirs to a global revolutionary movement that fought capitalism for control of the 20th century. They were on their way to surrender.
Fired by the teachings of China’s Mao Zedong, they had spent decades battling to overthrow the Indian state, and install in its stead a classless utopia. The rebellion they helped wage killed thousands. At its height nearly 20 years ago, India’s leader described the Maoists as the country’s biggest internal security threat, a blight on its status as the world’s largest democracy and its aspirations of becoming a global power.
Now the revolution is in its death throes.
In recent months security forces have killed a string of top Maoists and the rank-and-file are laying down their weapons. India’s capitalist economy is booming, and the ruling Hindu-nationalist government is crushing its above-ground leftist opponents at the ballot box. Maoism will be eradicated completely from the country this year, it has proclaimed.
Hours after they came out of the jungle, Papa Rao and his 17 comrades stepped onto a stage. In front of them was a row of cameras. Behind, a backdrop announced their “return to the mainstream,” in English and Hindi. Their surrendered, antiquated weapons were laid out and labeled, like museum exhibits; on tables covered in blue cloth, clips of ammunition were arrayed to form the Hindi word for “sacred vow.”
As the cameras rolled, each former insurgent was handed a rose and a copy of the Indian constitution: a symbolic pledge of a new allegiance. They listened to local politicians make speeches and stood for photos with members of the security forces, and then they were ushered off the stage and into the embrace of the Indian state.
The journey to this point began almost a century ago and hundreds of miles away in China, when Mao Zedong reshaped Marxist–Leninist theory to fit the pre-industrial conditions of his country. His new doctrine fueled a decades-long war – one that ultimately carried the communist movement to victory and state power in Beijing in 1949.
In the years following, Beijing funded or armed fellow communists in Vietnam, North Korea, Burma, Malaysia, Thailand and Cambodia, causing panic in Washington and other Western capitals as the ideological struggles of the Cold War rippled across Asia.
In India, Maoist guerillas are known by a different name: Naxals. That moniker comes from a violent 1967 peasant uprising against oppressive landlords in Naxalbari, a village in the shadow of the Himalayan foothills in northeast India. Its success inspired more uprisings, and in 1970 the Peking Review, the English-language mouthpiece of Mao’s government, wrote approvingly of how Indian peasants were following “Mao Zedong Thought” and had “smashed the feudal yoke and overthrown the crushing tyranny.” Beijing’s support does not appear to have extended to directly arming the Naxals, however.
A CIA report the same year gave a more sober assessment: “Their hit-and-run tactics and their spectacular exploits – bombings; murders; book burning; attacks upon police stations, movie houses, and libraries – have given the Naxalite movement newspaper headlines from which it derives both inspiration and new recruits.”
Over the following decades – despite splits and infighting – the Naxals cemented their hold in what became known as the “Red Corridor,” a huge swathe of rugged t