The Masses received this statement from the Forum Against Corporatization and Militarization (FACAM) regarding the surrender of Venugopal on Tuesday, December 9. The statement condems the surrender and betrayal of Mallojula Venugopal Rao (also known as Sonu), violation of democratic principles, and their blatant capitualtion to the corporate looting of natraul resources. We republish this statement in service of Proletarian Internationalism to the comrades in India struggling for democratic rights and dignity for the oppressed masses. Additional information can be found here from our comrades at The Partisan.
Condemn the Surrender of Venugopal As a Betrayal of the Adivasi Fight for Jal-Jangal-Jameen Across the World!
9th December 2025
Last month, Mallojula Venugopal Rao alias Sonu, a former Central Committee member of the Communist Party of India (Maoist), along with 61 other members, surrendered their arms to the right-wing BJP Chief Minister of Maharashtra Devendra Fadnavis in Gadchiroli. FACAM finds this surrender as a gross violation of the democratic principles of a non-international armed conflict (NIAC) as well as a gesture which serves the interests of the Hindutva state-big corporate nexus which is getting further emboldened in its pursuit of corporate loot of natural resources.
Gadchiroli has historically been a sight of great struggles for the preservation of jal-jangal-jameen. It was in 2008 when the foreign corporation Lloyd Metals and Energy Limited (LMEL) was first given the mining tender in Gadchiroli’s Surjagarh hills. But until 2015, despite the state’s numerous attempts at using its paramilitary forces to displace the Adivasi peasants of the region, the staunch resistance of the people, including armed resistance in the form of the Maoist movement, forced the company to scrap all its plans to begin mining operations in the region. The late Prof. G.N. Saibaba and numerous other democratic activists and peace-loving people rallied behind the just resistance of the Adivasi peasants across the country which led to the failure of the state’s genocidal extermination campaign Operation Greenhunt and the banning of the terroristic Salwa Judum paramilitia. This setback forced the Indian state and the foreign corporations back to the drawing board. During this period, the Indian government carried out various joint activities with international anti-people organizations like the Zionist Mossad which culminated with an experiment in Gadchiroli where the first Forward Operational Bases (FOBs) were built in 2015. The encirclement campaign carried out in Gadchiroli on the back of thousands of paramilitary forces of the Indian state was all geared towards the interest of exterminating and displacing all forms of resistance to Lloyd’s corporate loot of natural resources. The success of this experiment in Gadchiroli emboldened the Indian state to expand it to the entirety of Central India, which is what gave birth to what was called Operation SAMADHAN-Prahar in 2017, which became the Surajkund Scheme in 2022. Thousands of Adivasi peasants have given their lives in the struggle against SAMADHAN-Prahar and Surajkund Scheme to protect the natural resources of all of India, be it peaceful protestors in Silger of Bastar, be it a 6 month old infant or the mother who was breastfeeding, or armed combatants fighting against this loot of natural wealth. It was the people of Gadchiroli whose blood was the first to spill in this decisive fight. It is on this very soil that Venugopal sullied his name in history forever by standing alongside the same Hindutva fascist forces which have carried out numerous pogroms across the country against Muslims, Dalits and Adivasi peasants, including the ones who died in the fight at Surjagarh hills. Across history, indigenous people have always opposed land-grabbing, fighting undemocratic genocidal states who have sought to remove them from their lands in the name of developmental.
Whether it be Chief Sitting Bull’s armed resistance to protect the lands of American indigenous tribes against the European settler-colonialists, the Emiliano Zapatista-led massive indigenous resistance for independent-rule in Mexico or the Quechua people’s struggle in Peru against the fascist Fujimori regime, all such movements have seen the state reject any democratic dialogue with armed resistance of indigenous people while simultaneously promoting abdications from among their ranks as a means of trying to militarily resolve issues which are rooted entirely in the socio-economic fabric. In Mexico, the state went so far as to allow a section of the indigenous people who accepted big corporate interest in Mexico to become part of their government while on the other hand, they continued carrying out extermination campaigns against those who remained adamant in their demands for self-rule, which involve what is today called the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) in Chiapas. Ultimately, the indigenous people saw those who surrendered as those who betrayed the just demands of the people. It is also a fact that most of these movements did not meet their ends with this militaristic strategy. The American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has historically played a key role in disrupting such struggles through underhanded methods such as surrenders. Their role in Nicaragua and Vietnam is well documented, even going so far as to organizing the surrendered Sandanistas into the state-backed paramilitia Contras. A similar strategy was used among the Andean tribal peasantry in Peru where the state, backed by the American CIA, prepared a militia from among the peasants comprised largely of surrendered members of the People’s Guerrilla Army of the Communist Party of Peru. American government sees surrenders as a key component of psychological warfare in their publicly available counter-insurgency manuals. This is already happening in India, with surrendered Adivasi peasants who were part of the Maoist movement being re-organized into the state’s District Reserve Guard (DRG) who then carry out killings on behalf of the state. This practice itself is in violation of the 2011 Supreme Court judgement which banned the Salwa Judum and all subsequent attempts at admitting surrendered Naxalites into the state’s paramilitary. We question such policies of the Indian state which are blatantly motivated by the CIA’s template of disrupting democratic rights struggles across the world. The Surajkund Scheme’s promotion of psychological warfare is nothing but an imitation of methods utilized by the CIA, and surrenders remain a key part of this psychological warfare as a means of causing disarray among all democratic rights struggles. FACAM is also extremely apprehensive about the role played by Asin alias Anil, an erstwhile member of the CPI (Maoist) from Haryana who surrendered in Gadchiroli and later on became part of Lloyd Metals’ public relations office. Per news reports, Asin played a key role in facilitating this surrender and right after his surrender, his employers publicly offered Venugopal a job as the brand ambassador for their mining projects in Gadchiroli. Lloyd has also offered to employ all the surrendered Maoists in the region. It is therefore highly alarming that right after Venugopal’s surrender, Anant (spokesperson of the MMC Special Zonal Committee of the CPI Maoist) also surrendered in the district and even demanded to be allowed to surrender with the same pomp and affair that was given to Venugopal. It seems that the imperialist corporations are now willing to employ surrendered Maoist leaders to be the public faces of their project of corporate loot.
Such practices contravene India’s international humanitarian law obligations. This is an understanding which is also acknowledged in international law, as both the principles of war established in the Geneva Convention’s Additional Protocol 3, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or the International Covenant for Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) as well as customary international law. These laws discourage the banning of organized political forces which are waging a non-international armed struggle on a political issue and encourage holding democratic peace talks between the two belligerents with arbitration from neutral actors. This was seen in the last 3 years in the numerous dialogues between Hamas and the Zionist Israeli government as well as the Dutch-arbitrated peace talks between the Communist Party of Philippines and the Filipino government in 2024. Each time, the UN and all international actors upheld the democratic right of a people to organize themselves and practice a political ideology which may or may not lead to an armed conflict. Each time, the UN and various nations also upheld the belief that for peace talks to occur, temporary cessation of armed violence and area-domination campaigns by either force’s military wing in the areas of dominance of the other force are valid pre-conditions for democratic dialogue. Whenever peace talks are held in compromise of such conditions, chances of failure are significantly higher as seen with the recent peace negotiation between Hamas and the Israeli state mediated by the American government. The very American government which funded and armed the genocidal Zionist Israeli government cannot be a neutral mediator and the culmination of these peace talks has already seen ceasefire violations by Israel, the disruption of humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza and the surrender of a large cache of arms by Hamas which ensures the inability of Hamas to defend the interests of Palestinian people in future if Israel decides to not abide by the terms of the peace talks. Hamas keeps reiterating that they will surrender their arms to a Palestinian body after the end of the Israeli occupation on Palestinian land but none of this prevents formation of a Fatah-like political group to be the Palestinian body to which Hamas surrenders its arms, turning Gaza into an outlet of US imperialism and Israeli domination, just as the West Bank. This has left the Palestinian people toothless in their democratic struggle for self-determination. Surrender of arms was a primary condition for Israel, which ensures the conflict either does not end, or it ends against the interests of the Palestinian people.
The Hindutva Indian state, contrary to all its international obligations and inspired by the aforementioned Zionist regime, has ignored the CPI (Maoist)’s call for peace talks for over an year, along with their preconditions which fall entirely in line with international law principles of non-international armed conflict. Instead, while on one hand they claim to be interested in peace talks, on the other, the Indian state has carried out numerous fake encounters, acts of gross disproportionate violence against armed combatants as well as unlawful killings of hundreds of unarmed combatants and civilians in the region. The state has promoted surrenders from the ranks of the belligerents by way of abandoning all pretenses of democracy which are entirely counterproductive to the cause of resolving socio-economic conflicts as brute militaristic and state terroristic methods have never solved such matters. Mallojula Venugopal Rao’s call for surrender among the Maoist ranks thus run counterproductive to FACAM’s long-standing efforts to hold the Indian state accountable for its international and domestic democratic obligations. It completely betrays the cause of protecting the democratic rights of all to practice a political ideology and promotes the criminalization of thought. We thus see this call for mass surrender as a call that encourages the Indian state to continue its unlawful, fascistic and undemocratic practices in Bastar and the rest of the country.
Forum Against Corporatization and Militarization therefore, condemns the surrender of Venugopal as an act in the interests of Hindutva state-big corporate nexus and a gross betrayal of the historic struggle of not just India’s Adivasi people for jal-jangal-jameen but also the struggle of all indigenous people world over who are struggling against genocidal states, be it in Palestine, Philippines or in Mexico. We encourage all democratic-minded people to uphold the call for democratic dialogue between CPI (Maoist) and the Indian state as the method of finding resolutions to socio-economic conflicts, not military methods such as surrenders.
The Masses 