Police said the former insurgents had chosen to abandon armed struggle and rejoin civilian life as part of an ongoing nationwide effort to dismantle the final remnants of the Maoist movement.

The Telangana police said in a statement that 47 Maoist members had “chosen to join the mainstream,” adding that “almost all remaining underground key leaders have now been neutralized.”The surrender follows Home Minister Amit Shah’s declaration on March 30 that India had become “Naxal-free,” marking what the government described as the effective end of an insurgency that began nearly six decades ago.

The rebellion traces its origins to 1967 in Naxalbari, a village in West Bengal’s Himalayan foothills, where a peasant uprising inspired a Maoist movement that later spread across large parts of central and eastern India.

At its peak in the mid-2000s, the insurgency operated across what officials called the “Red Corridor,” stretching through mineral-rich and forested regions, with an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 fighters active across multiple states.

More than 12,000 people, including rebels, security personnel, and civilians, were killed during the conflict, according to official figures.The government intensified military and intelligence operations over the past two years, targeting the final strongholds of the insurgency in remote forest regions, particularly in Chhattisgarh, Telangana, Odisha, and parts of Maharashtra.

Authorities said surrendered rebels were being provided rehabilitation packages that included vocational training, financial support, and new civilian identities to facilitate reintegration into society.Police said the 47 former rebels would receive a combined rehabilitation package worth about $159,000, or roughly $3,400 each.

Officials have also appealed to remaining underground cadres to lay down their arms and take advantage of state rehabilitation schemes.Despite the decline of the insurgency, authorities face the continuing challenge of clearing hundreds of improvised land mines and explosive devices planted by Maoist groups along forest routes and remote villages.

The rebels had long claimed to be fighting for the rights of marginalized Indigenous communities in central India’s resource-rich tribal belts, where disputes over land rights, mining, and displacement remain politically sensitive.

Security analysts say that while organized armed resistance has sharply weakened, the social and economic grievances that originally fueled the movement continue to persist in several regions.

The latest surrenders reflect the government’s effort to convert military gains into long-term stability while preventing the possibility of renewed underground mobilization.

Cyclone Fani (“Snake” in Bengali) slammed into the eastern state of Odisha earlier in the day, reportedly killing at least eight people and one in Bangladesh, where it was headed after Kolkata, officials said.

With effects felt as far away as Mount Everest, winds gusting up to 200 km per hour sent coconut trees flying and cut off power, water and telecommunications.

Authorities in Odisha, where 10,000 people perished in a 1999 cyclone, had evacuated more than a million people as they worried about a possible 1.5-meter (five-foot) storm surge sweeping far inland.

Eight people were killed, the Press Trust of India (PTI) reported, including a teenage boy, a woman hit by concrete debris and an elderly woman who suffered a heart attack in one of several thousand shelters packed with families.

Odisha disaster management official Prabhat Mahapatra said there were not yet any confirmed casualty figures.

“Around 160 people were injured in Puri alone. Our relief work is ongoing,” he said.

Authorities in Bangladesh, next in Fani’s trajectory, said a woman was killed by a tree, and that 14 villages were inundated as a tidal surge breached flood dams. Some 400,000 people have been taken to shelters, officials said.

Hundreds of thousands more people in India’s West Bengal state have also been given orders to flee. Local airports have been shut, with train lines and roads closed.

“It just went dark and then suddenly we could barely see five meters in front of us,” said one resident in the holy city of Puri, where Fani made landfall.

“There were roadside food carts, store signs all flying by in the air,” the man said. “The wind is deafening.”

Another witness said he saw a small car being blown along a street by the winds and then turned over.

PTI reported that a big crane collapsed and that a police booth was dragged 60 meters (yards) by the wind.

As Fani headed northeastwards, losing strength but still packing a punch, Odisha authorities battled to remove fallen trees and other debris strewn over roads and to restore phone and internet services.

Electricity pylons were down, tin roofs were ripped off, piles of bricks could be seen and windows of hotels and homes were smashed.

Gouranga Malick, 48, was solemnly picking up bricks after the small two-room house he shared with his six-strong family collapsed, its roof blown away.

“I have never witnessed this type of devastation in my lifetime,” he said.

“Energy infrastructure has been completely destroyed,” Odisha’s chief minister Naveen Patnaik said.

A baby was born near Odisha’s capital Bhubaneswar just as the cyclone tore through.

“We are calling her Lady Fani,” a spokesperson for the hospital told PTI.

Next in Fani’s sights was West Bengal’s capital Kolkata, home to 4.5 million people, with the eye of the storm due around midnight (1830 GMT) and rain already falling hard several hours before.

The city normally teeming with people was all but deserted, with shopping malls shut and hawkers absent from the pavements after packing up their stalls. Only a few vehicles packed with people heading home plied the roads.

Subrata Das, manager of the AXIS Mall, said: “We have seen how the cyclone ravaged some buildings in Bhubaneswar. We don’t want to take any risk. We are trying to survive the cyclone.”

“If we don’t take our things, we fear the cyclone will raze everything,” said Murad Hussain, 45, who runs a stall.

“We are monitoring the situation 24/7 and doing all it takes… Be alert, take care and stay safe for the next two days,” West Bengal’s chief minister Mamata Banerjee tweeted.

The winds were felt as far away as Mount Everest, with tents blown away at Camp 2 at 6,400 meters (21,000 feet) and Nepali authorities cautioning helicopters against flying.

Ports have been closed but the Indian Navy has sent six warships to the region. Hundreds of workers were taken off offshore oil rigs.

“We are mooring our boat because it’s the only means of income for us. Only Allah knows when we can go back to fishing again,” Akbar Ali, a fisherman near the town of Dacope in Bangladesh, said while battling surging waves to tie his boat to a tree. — Saudi Gazette