Deep in the dense Saranda forests of Jharkhand, over 3,000 CRPF commandos from Chhattisgarh have been deployed as part of a high-risk manhunt for the last active member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of India (Maoist), Misr Basra. As the elite forces turn their pressure on one of the country’s most wanted men, they find support from an unexpected corner – his surviving family, estranged, but desperate to see him alive.
In his late sixties, Basra, who carries a bounty $1 crore and similar rewards in neighboring states, holed up in the jungle with a group of loyal forces. His family made a final appeal through the government, calling on him to lay down his arms.
Security forces said Basra, known by the aliases Bhaskar, Sunil, Sunirmal and Vivek, refuses to surrender, even as most other senior Maoist leaders have either laid down arms or been neutralized over the past two years, following a renewed push by the Center to eliminate the rebels.
Even as elite CRPF commandos comb the forests, a more intimate call is being made from within the Basra family.
Over the past month, the Maoist leader’s son and younger brother, Deval Besra, wrote letters urging him to surrender, saying the rebellion had effectively collapsed.
“The government officials said they would somehow ensure that the letters reach him. Maybe it will force him to surrender and join the mainstream like others. I wrote to him that I may not understand why he became a Naxal then, but I know that refusing to surrender or fight the security forces now is wrong,” said his son, who asked to remain anonymous.
Ibn Basra, who works as a canteen assistant in southern India, said he last saw his father in the early 1990s, when he was only five or six years old.
“I have faint memories. My grandfather took me to the forest to meet him. Then he abandoned us and then he joined the Naxal ranks. After that, my mother also left us,” he recalls. “I don’t want my identity to be revealed because he was a missing figure in my life, and our lives. In all my documents, my uncle is my father. I live a decent life. I don’t want anyone to know who my father is.”
According to Devilal Basra, the Maoist leader left his home in Girdah district in the late 1980s and never returned.
“He was studying at PK Roy Memorial College, Dhanbad, from where he completed his graduation. He must have met Naxals when he got admission in the post-graduation program there,” he said. “It’s been almost 40 years. We only saw his pictures in newspapers and were told that he had become a top Naxal leader and received millions of rupees as a reward for his arrest.”
Speaking about the efforts being made to capture Basra, a senior government official said, “Three battalions of CRPF Cobra commandos have already reached Jharkhand. They are working with the Special Task Force (STF) of Jharkhand Police to find Basra and his other cadres. It is difficult for Basra to enter Odisha and even Chhattisgarh as there are no military personnel to help him in the jungle. It will take days or weeks before he can From entering Odisha to Chhattisgarh because there were no military personnel to help him in the jungle, he was arrested.”
Security officials said that in addition to being part of the central committee, Basra was a member of the party’s political bureau and also headed the party’s central military committee.
Basra, a long-time activist in Saranda district, is alleged to have masterminded dozens of Naxal attacks, including the April 2004 ambush in which 32 police personnel were killed. He was arrested in Ranchi in 2007, but escaped in 2009 after a Maoist attack on the court complex in Lakhisarai in Bihar.
“He has been lucky so far. His closest aide, Anal Da, a central committee member with whom he spent decades in the banned party, was killed in a gun battle with security forces in January this year,” the above-mentioned official said, adding that Anal Da was among 15 Maoists killed in the shootout in Saranda.
The official also said that Basra escaped during another shootout last month. “But it won’t be long before the forces are able to arrest him, and even destroy him [top Maoist commander Madvi Hidma] The official added that he eventually ran out of luck after initially managing to escape several gun battles over the past two years.
Records seen by HT show that the National Investigation Agency (NIA) is also investigating three cases against Basra, including a July 29, 2024 case linked to the recovery of cash, explosives and extortion materials in the Tonto forests of Jharkhand. It is also investigating the January 4, 2022 Maoist attack on former Jharkhand Liberation Army Gurcharan Nayak, in which two of his bodyguards were killed; and the April 25, 2022 case regarding alleged attempts to revive the banned group through fresh recruitment in Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh.
In all three cases, Basra was booked on terrorism charges under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA).
In a stark irony, even as Basra has spent decades waging an armed struggle against the state — often targeting public infrastructure like schools — his brother Devilal now works as an assistant teacher in a Jharkhand government department.
As uncertainty looms over Basra’s fate, his family waits for word that may never come. “We have not yet received any response from him to our letters,” Devial said. “We do not even know whether these senior government officials were able to send that letter to him.”
“I’m worried about him. After all, he’s part of the family. But then he chose his own path.”
