India, May 22 -- The killing of Nambala Keshav Rao, alias Basavaraju, the general secretary of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) in a police action in Chhattisgarh is the biggest setback faced by the banned outfit in recent times. Reduced to a rump of armed guerillas and cornered by security forces in the jungles overlapping Chhattisgarh, Telangana, Jharkhand, and Maharashtra, the CPI (Maoist) now faces disintegration. According to government data, 401 Naxalites have been killed in the State while 1,355 surrendered between December 1, 2023, and May 21, 2025. The Vishnu Deo Sai government won office in Chhattisgarh in December 2023, and since then, there has been coordinated action from the Centre and the state government against Maois...