Battle for Bastar Part 5: Koraput police armoury raid and its aftermath

Around the middle of October 2003, Mangal Mudiya got an order from his commanders to assemble his 30-odd comrades and head for Koraput in Odisha.

He and his team of guerillas initially had no inkling of the big plan. Orders came; they obeyed.

Mudiya, at the tender age of 19, was already an area commander of the erstwhile People’s War Group (PWG) in south Bastar’s dense forests, and harboured the dream of bringing an armed revolution.

From Gangaloor, then Mudiya’s operational base deep inside today’s Bijapur district, Koraput in west Odisha is about 265 km, but trekking through the tricky terrain in what is known as Dandakaranya (the fabled forests where Lord Rama is said to have spent his 13 years of Vanvas), was replete with many challenges. But the dream of an armed revolution was enough of a drive for the young rebels to keep walking.

Planned to perfection

The route, needless to say, was not a straightforward journey. They had to be discreet with their identities and do a lot of tasks enroute.

First, they walked to Konta, now in Sukma district of Bastar, through the jungles of Basaguda and Jagargonda where the PWG had strong presence. From there, they headed for Vishakhapatnam and Srikakulam in coastal Andhra Pradesh.

“We spent two months there waiting for orders from the top leaders, every day rehearsing the plan and planning our post-raid escape with ammunition and weapons we would be looting,” remembers Mudiya, 41 today, speaking in Hindi which has the accent of his mother-tongue Madia. Clad in a simple sky-blue check shirt and dark-blue pants, he looks older than his age.

It would take months before they would reach their destination to partake in their action. On the way, they trained, rested, and interacted with local tribals about their movement.

“It needed a lot of patience,” he says.

In Srikaluam, where other teams had also reached, he says, they bought second-hand vehicles over days: One truck, one commander jeep, two 307 tempo-matadors, and a few bikes.

From Srikakulam, Mudiya — whose nom de guerre in the party was Gopi — left for Koraput, with his team in the jeep. They were dressed as civilians, but had weapons on them.

By then, they knew of their plan and escape route: Their target was the Koraput police armoury; their action would be an audacious loot of the district police weaponry and ammunition.

Just months before the merger of the PWG and the Maoist Communist Centre (MCC) — the new, bigger, outfit of the Naxalites, CPI (Maoists), came into being in September 2004, launching the bloody chapter in the history of this armed movement — this robbery would help the guerillas amass weapons and ammunition for a protracted war on the Indian state.

Also read: Chhattisgarh anti-Naxal operation: Out-of-turn promotion reward for 295 cops

Switch to the other side

Long out of the banned outfit — he gave up arms and surrendered before the Bijapur police in 2020 after spending 19 years as an underground armed guerrilla — Mudiya is today a constable with Chhattisgarh’s anti-Naxal force called the District Reserve Guards (DRG). His job: help the police with translations of the pamphlets and circulars captured from the arrested or slain rebels and sometimes be an interlocuter during the interrogations.

Mudiya is also among the surrendered cadres who have played a key role in turning the tables on the armed movement in Bastar.

One of seven siblings, Mudiya went on to become a member of the Dandakaranya Special Zonal Committee (DkSZC), a divisional committee of the Maoists that held the sway not-so-long ago over the central Indian red zone enveloping parts of Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, and Odisha. But his operational area remained much of west Bastar division, mainly Bijapur.

“In the early phase of the party merger, we carried out many raids on the police stations, but the Koraput armoury was certainly the biggest and very meticulously planned,” Mudiya says.

About a thousand guerillas, assembled from different zones, converged in the sleepy Odisha town just around the fated day — February 6, 2004. Most of them had taken different routes, from as far as parts of Gadchiroli, west of the river Indravati that separates Chhattisgarh from Maharashtra, for months before the daring action.

Mudiya says the entire plan and execution was crafted by Basavaraju alias Nambala Keshava Rao, the general secretary of the CPI (Maoists) killed in a coordinated security operation in Abujhmadh area of Narayanpur district on the morning of May 21, 2025. Basavaraju then headed the military wing of the PWG.

Also read: Who is Basavaraju, the top Maoist commander killed in Bastar encounter?

Most arduous action ever

Jalamsay Lalsay Sadmek, a former divisional committee member who surrendered before the Maharashtra police about 10 years ago, was also a part of the operation. “I went with my team from central Gadchiroli,” says Sadmek, now 53.

In contrast to the 20 years that he spent in the forests as a gun-trotting party’s military member, Sadmek is now married and works in the Naxal Cell of Gadchiroli police. “It was the most arduous action ever,” he says. Not only did it involve long walks, but also lugging sacks full of ammunition on the way back.

Sadmek was much senior to Mudiya, but they met and worked together on many occasions. Both of them surrendered before their respective state police forces on the same grounds — that they had begun to see the futility of their armed resistance and, at times, the brazen military actions against the intensifying security operations against which, they realised, they stood no chance to win.

A police slip-up

All through the Koraput action, the Maoist cadres faced little or no resistance, Mudiya recalls. Only one police patrol party, on some suspicion, stopped the vehicle in which he and a few rebels were travelling on the way to Koraput, made some inquiries, and let them off after his team paid a paltry bribe of Rs 2,000. Hours later, Odisha erupted in panic.

Around 9 pm that fateful day, all hell broke loose. It was a nearly six-hour operation that left Odisha — and much of the security apparatus in India — dumbstruck.

After reaching the town, the Maoists split into different groups, asked the shops to quickly down their shutters and leave, and swooped down on the entire police establishment.

Firing indiscriminately and at will and hurling grenades at the paramilitary jawans, they looted the district armoury, five police stations, Koraput jail, attacked the superintendent of police (SP) office and the Odisha state armed police (OSAP) battalion. Even the rifle of a night guard at a nearby bank ATM and treasury was snatched.

Also read: Bijapur Naxalites were from Maoists' strongest Bastar unit: Police

Free run

“When we reached the district armoury, it was guarded by just one sentry; all we had to do was neutralize him,” Mudiya recalls.

The sentry was Nakula Nayak, who opened fire from his weapon but stood no chance against the large formation. Eleven others, including civilians, were killed in the melee.

Koraput SP Arun Bothra reportedly had a providential escape, because he had left his office minutes before the Maoists struck. When he rushed back, he saw the rebels looting the weapons of his men. The rebels mistook him for a civilian and asked him to leave the office.

The SP reportedly climbed atop a house and, joined by his personal guards, began firing from his pistol, but it was all in vain.

On their way back, the Maoists looted Kakariguma, Laxmipur, and Narayanpatna police stations as well.

The most difficult part

A PWG press release then claimed that the cache included “weapons, grenades, ammunition valued at Rs 50 crore. Mudiya says they looted nearly 500 weapons of different make (.303 rifles, LMG, SLR, mortars, Sten guns, revolvers and pistols) along with 30,000 rounds of bullets and a number of mortar shells and grenades.

“After the action, we burnt down all the vehicles once we had dumped the ammunition and weapons in the pre-decided locations in the neighbouring forests of Bastar,” he says.

“The difficult part of that action was carrying the loot back to our bases,” says Mudiya.

“Walking back several hundred kilometres over days and bringing back the weapons discreetly wasn’t easy,” he says.

Also read: What we know about Mukesh Chandrakar, and his channel Bastar Junction

A year of labour

In Gadchiroli, Sadmek says, he went with his cadres twice to the dump site and brought back their share of weapons and ammunition. “It took us a year or more of labour to get the arms.”

“Every single part of that action was planned to perfection over months and with patience,” says Mudiya.

Basavaraju and his personal guards did the recce trips to Koraput several times, drew the plans, the escape routes, and even calculated the risks. It gave a fillip to the movement in that period, he says. The weapons and the training that followed after strengthened the military wing of the Maoists, across Dandakaranya, leading to many stunning actions against the police.

Weapons also got them the local support, Mudiya says, both out of fear and trust — that the tribals would finally get “justice”, and they would keep intact their Jal-Jungle-Jameen.

Almost along similar lines, the Maoists attacked and looted the Nayagarh district police stations and armoury (again in Odisha) in February 2008, virtually laying the siege of the town, killing 13 policemen and one civilian in the action.

There, too, they looted a huge cache of weapons and ammunition, reminiscent of the Koraput action. It was planned and executed by local cadres. Many more such daring robberies of the police weapons and ammunition followed.

Also read: Chhattisgarh: Toll rises to 31; highest suffered by Maoists in single operation in 24 yrs

The Salwa Judum effect

“I never killed anyone before or after though I did participate in many ambushes and actions,” Mudiya says. That was the major grouse of the outlawed party against him, which led to internal inquiries against him.

“I saw a lot of maar-kaat (bloodshed) during the Salwa Judum years (2005-2015),” he says. It was during the Judum years that the Maoists got overwhelming support, as well as fresh cadres, in heaps, he notes.

“But I grew disillusioned over the years, particularly when the mobile phones began to reach every nook and cranny, and realised there’s a big, different world out there,” he says. “The issues we raised then were genuine, but our means were absolutely wrong.”

Part 1: How Maoist citadel was breached

Part 2: How tide was turned with multi-pronged strategy

Part 3: Blitzkrieg in the ‘forbidden hills’

Part 4: What next for the Maoists?

Coming next week: Exclusive video reports from the ground in Bastar