The Life and Times of Madvi Hidma 

Madvi Hidma is dead. He was 51. The Maoist commander who terrorised  the administration and security forces in central India’s forested heartland, will not haunt them anymore. 

“Madvi Hidma, a Central Committee member of the Maoists who was formerly the commander of a PLGA battalion, is known as a face of terrorism,” said Sundarraj, the Inspector General of Chhattisgarh police in-charge of the Maoist hotbed of Bastar region, hours after the security forces announced his death during a gunfight on November 18 in Alluri Sitharama Raju district of neighbouring Andhra Pradesh. 

Hidma’s wife, Madkam Raje alias Rajakka, shared his fate along with four other Maoist guerillas. Sundarraj called the outcome “a decisive advantage for the security forces, not just for the Dandakaranya region or Bastar, but for the entire India.”

Among the top Maoist leadership, Hidma, a tribal, was the only one who was born and brought up in Bastar. Under the current circumstances—in the aftermath of a series of severe losses—he was being considered the backbone of the movement. 

His party, the CPI(Maoist), alleged that he was killed in a fake encounter. In a press statement issued on November 20, the party’s central committee spokesperson Abhay said that Hidma and some others had gone to Vijayawada in Andhra Pradesh for medical treatment. However, some of their cadres betrayed and leaked the information to the security forces. 

They were arrested on November 15 and killed in a fake encounter after they disagreed to surrender, the party alleged.  

In Purvati, thousands of locals from over half a dozen villagers in the neighbourhood gathered when the bodies of Hidma and Raje reached on November 20. They wailed endlessly as the couple were cremated on the same pyre. 

Hidma was born in Purvati in 1974. A remote village amidst dense forests, Purvati is about 150 km from the district headquarters of Sukma and sits along Sukma’s border with Bijapur district. Sukma district also shares its borders with the states of Odisha, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. 

He grew up at a time in the 1980s when the Andhra-born CPI(ML)(People’s War), or the PW, started spreading its roots in Bastar, forming armed squads for raids on the residences of the powerful, building mass movements through frontal organisations and establishing Janatana Sarkars or ‘people’s governments’ for local administration in those densely forested belts where the government barely had any existence. 

According to Toronto University political scientist Shivaji Mukherjee’s 2021 essay, Colonial Institutions and Civil War, the northern and southern parts of Chhattisgarh had British colonial indirect rule through feudatory princely states, which created weak state capacity and despotic extraction of land revenue and natural resources through landlords and feudatory chiefs. This created tribal grievances, which the Maoists capitalised on.

Hidma got associated with the PW as a teenager, during the mid-’90s. He was not the first from his village to join the Maoists, but he became more deeply involved than many others. In 1997, he became a PW wholetimer and went underground—serving first in the Basaguda squad that operated in Bijapur-Sukma border areas, later in neighbouring Maharashtra’s Gadchiroli and subsequently back in Bastar to work in their armoury manufacture department.  

At that time, military development was happening at quite a fast pace. In 1995, the PW formed its first platoon in the Dandakaranya region by bringing several squads together. On December 2, 2000, the PW launched their own army—the People’s Liberation Guerilla Army (PLGA). Hidma was then only a squad leader. The PLGA gained in strength after the PW merged with the Maoist Communist Centre of India (MCCI) in 2004 to form the CPI(Maoist).

As the Maoists developed platoons into company formations, he served as a platoon commander in their Company 2. From 2006 to 2009, he was the commander and secretary of their Company 3 and, in 2009, he took charge as the commander of the Battalion 1 formed the previous year. 

He became the battalion’s secretary in 2011, the same year that he was also inducted into the Dandakaranya Special Zonal Committee (DKSZC) of the CPI(Maoist)—one of the party’s most important committees. Hidma was the first local tribal to be part of the DKSZC—the rest were all non-tribals who came from Andhra and built the movement there.  

The Battalion 1 was subsequently blamed for most of the deadly offensives that the Maoists launched on the security forces and some senior politicians. This is why Hidma became more famous, or infamous, than many other Maoist commanders. 

In 2018, After CPI(Maoist) general secretary Ganapthy stepped down due to age-related issues and Baravraj, the chief of the central military commission, stepped into Ganapathy’s shoes, Hidma came to have even greater responsibility in the PLGA.  

However, over the past couple of years, especially the last few months, Maoists faced an unprecedented setback with the arrest, deaths and surrenders of a senior of functionaries, from grassroots cadres to top leaders. Hidma’s space was shrinking. 

Turning Tide 

In February 2024, security forces set up a camp in Puvati. It was a major achievement—a police camp at the heart of rebel strongholds, considered impenetrable for the security forces only a few years ago. It’s the native village of Hidma and Barse Deva, Hidma’s successor as the commander of the PLGA Battalion 1. 

Just two days before the camp was set up, Chhattisgarh chief minister announced a new scheme, Niyad Nellanar (your good village), through which benefits of all government schemes will reach villages within a 5-km radius of the camp through the police camps being set up in those areas. 

Gradually, Maoists from Purvati started surrendering, too. For example, Purvati native Ramesh Madavi and his wife, Roshni alias Hidme, surrendered in January this year. 

This year, unprecedented losses in a series of successful security operations, including the Karreguttalu Hills operation on Chhattisgarh-Telangana border that destroyed much of their technical (military) infrastructure, the Gundekot operation in Narayanpur district that left general secretary Nambala Keshav Rao alias Basavraj dead, and the killing of central committee members Katta Sudarshan Reddy alias Kosa and Ramachandra Reddy alias Raju Dada, left Hidma rather lonesome. 

Besides, surrenders of politburo member Venugopal Rao alias Sonu alias Bhupati, central committee members Pothula Padmavathi alias Moyna alias Sujatha, Takkalapalli Vasudeva Rao alias Ashanna alias Satish and Pulluri Prasad Rao alias Chandranna made it extremely difficult for Hidma to continue with his activities. 

In fact, in the last letter that Ramachandra Reddy had written to his party leadership, dated September 9, he had highlighted that the police informant network was now so effective that it could breach the courier chain of the party leaders to the last point. Kosa and Raju’s end came similarly, the party alleged.  

Hidma’s end was approaching, as the security forces were now able to focus on him as the last major threat standing. They had the help of intelligence from hundreds of surrendered Maoists, apart from other surveillance methods.  

After Hidma’s death, Chhattisgarh chief minister Vishnu Deo Sai described him as “the face of bloodshed, violence and terror in Bastar for years,” whose death would now allow old and deep wounds to heal. As the leader of the main battalion, Hidma’s name came to be associated with most of the major ambushes that the Maoists carried out on security forces over the past decade and a half.

However, the scene at his native village for his funeral—as depicted in videos released from the scene by journalists on the spot—also reveal that many also considered Hidma a hero. People cried, as if they had lost one of their own, and a dear one.  

The comment section of many such videos from Purvati on the funeral day was flooded with praises and eulogies for him. Some described him as a protector of the tribal people and their forest resources from corporate and government interests. Others called him a fighter who gave the marginalised and the oppressed a voice and some hope.