The Maoist, in his own words

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Kolkata: Narla Rabi Sharma’s luck ran out three days after he gave the Andhra Pradesh police the slip near Patna junction. On October 13, the Jharkhand police arrested Sharma and his wife Bellapu Anuradha alias Ranjita at Hazaribagh for alleged Naxal links. Sharma is now one of the accused in the killing of Jharkhand special branch intelligence officer PS Induwar.

The agricultural scientist is the latest, erudite face to emerge out of the Naxal structure, a group after the arrest of Kobad Ghandy.

Spread of organisation

The organisation is well-entrenched in West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand, Orissa, Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra. The cadres usually start working in areas with large populations of tribals and backward classes. As their influence increases, they set up area committees followed by zonal committees.

The party cadre in these committees in Bihar and Jharkhand is well armed. A lot of the weapons were snatched from police stations and barracks and improvised firearms were acquired from local arms dealers and smugglers. Sharma himself is an expert on arms training and is believed to have trained 30-40 youth from Bihar and Jharkhand for 15 days in the jungles of Gotag and elsewhere.

Sharma & organisation

Sharma reportedly joined the Bihar cadre of the CPI-ML (PU) — which later merged with the CPI-ML (PW) to form the CPI (Maoist) — in 1998 and two years later, was made Area Committee member. In 2002, after being selected as State Committee member, Sharma was entrusted with party operations in Jharkhand and Bihar, a post he held till 2006 — the year he joined the party’s state Military Commission.

Sharma divulged details about local guerrilla squads, village defence squads and two Regional Military Commissions. Investigators said that Sharma mentioned two companies working under the Eastern Regional Bureau — Jharkhand-Orissa Company, and Jharkhand-Bihar Company.

The Eastern Regional Bureau, he reportedly said in his confession, operates in Bihar, Jharkhand, Orissa, West Bengal and Assam, the Central Regional Bureau in Andhra Pradesh and Dandakaranya (the Bastar region), the Northern Regional Bureau in Haryana, Punjab, Delhi and Rajasthan, and the South-west Regional Bureau in Maharashtra, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala. He is learnt to have divulged that the party has a research and development wing, known as the Central Technical Committee, formed in 2007, with its units in Bhopal and Rourkela.

Sharma said 12-13 platoons were now working in Jharkhand-Bihar-Orissa and the total strength of the party was 2,000-2,500.

The plan, the target