During his police interrogation, senior Naxal leader Narla Rabi Sharma is said to have talked about the organisational structure of the CPI(Maoist), its plans and how money moves within the outfit. The Sunday Express pieces together details of his interrogation after extensive interviews with the investigators

Narla Rabi Sharma’s luck ran out three days after he gave the Andhra Pradesh Police the slip near Patna junction. Then on October 13, the Jharkhand Police arrested Sharma and his wife Bellapu Anuradha alias Ranjita at Hazaribag for alleged Naxal links. Sharma is now one of the accused in the killing of Jharkhand Special Branch intelligence officer P.S. Induwar.

The agricultural scientist is the latest erudite face to emerge out of the Naxal structure after the recent arrest of Doon School-educated Kobad Ghandy. Sharma was born in 1965 in Tirumalapuram village in Andhra Pradesh’s Mahabubnagar district, the eldest of four children born to school teacher Sudhakar Sharma and Sulochana Devi. After his post graduation from the Rajendranagar Agriculture College in Andhra Pradesh, he studied for his PhD at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute, Delhi, from 1993 to 1997. In police records, his occupation is listed as translator-cum-teacher at the CPI(Maoist)’s Eastern Regional Bureau in Jharkhand and Bihar.

In 1985, while he was in his last year of graduation at the Rajendranagar Agriculture College, he joined the students’ movement under the banner of the Radical Students Union and was later elected ‘city secretary’. That was the beginning of his shift to Naxal ideology. He is said to have told the police that as a youth, he dreamt of a classless society and toured various parts of Andhra Pradesh. There, the “severe exploitation, inequality, imperialism and fascism in society” moved him into taking up arms. He joined the CPI-ML(PU) in 1998 and later, when the outfit merged with the CPI-ML(People’s War) and the Maoist Coordination Centre, he became a member of the resultant CPI(Maoist). In 1998, Sharma was arrested by the Andhra Police for alleged Naxal links and released a year later.

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