Top Maoist leader Kishan Da, wife Sheela Marandi arrested in Jharkhand

Ranchi, November 12 

Top Maoist leader Prashant Bose alias Kishan Da was arrested on Friday, officials said. 

Bose, a 75-year-old insurgent who was carrying a reward of Rs 1 crore, is a politburo member of the outlawed CPI (Maoist).  

Kishan Da is also the secretary of the CPI (Maoist) eastern regional bureau.

Known to be an intellectual and an ideologue, he was the chief of the Maoist Communist Centre of India (MCCI) until its 2004 reunification with another insurgent group— Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist) People’s War—into what has since been known as the CPI (Maoist). He was one of the people who engineered the reunification. 

His wife Sheela Marandi, the sole female member of the CPI(Maoist), was arrested with him, officials said.

Marandi, a member of the Central Committee, was previously arrested in 2006 and was released from a prison in Rourkela in 2016. She was inducted back into the party soon after. 

Police told PTI that the arrests came on the basis of intelligence inputs.

Born in West Bengal, Bose, alias Kishan Da, was in charge of the insurgents’ activities in Bihar, Jharkhand, and West Bengal, and was believed to have been operating from Saranda forests.

--- Agencies

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