Southern States - Andhra Pradesh

KS - guiding force of PWG

By Our Special Correspondent

Hyderabad April 12. Kondapalli Seetaramiah was the general secretary of the most militant naxalite group, the People's War Group, from its inception in 1975 till 1992, when he was ignominously expelled from the party on grounds of senility.

Mr Seetaramiah's arrest in 1992 was also a matter of dispute, with some believing that he actually surrendered to the police and that this was shown as an arrest. KS, as he was known, was a self-taught person who completed a series of courses in Hindi offered by the Hindi Prachar Sabha and became a Hindi teacher at the Railway School in Hanamkonda. After the collapse of the Srikakulam naxalite movement in 1971 following the death of Vempatapu Sathyanarayana and Adibhotla Kailasam, there was a lull for a few years when KS established the PWG with its belief in armed insurrection.

He built up a big apparatus of hideouts, arms dumps and courier system for the underground movement which started in the north Telengana districts and soon spread to the areas across the Godavari in Maharashtra, Bastar and Orissa. He had a powerful Central Organising Commitee with people like K.G. Sathyamurthy and Mukku Subba Reddy, who however left the PWG in the 1990s following serious differences with KS.

Inside the PWG itself, Muppala Lakshmana Rao, alias Ganapathi, a school teacher in Karimnagar who is the current Secretary of the Central Committee, started concentrating power in his hands and assembled a Central Committee that openly disliked KS's way of functioning. KS was expelled after he was accused of casteism.

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