Arrested Naxalite leader recognised as long-lost brother

HYDERABAD: Sadula (Sadanala) Rammohan is still in a state of disbelief. “We are happy to know that he is alive. All these years, we had no clue about his whereabouts. We had no idea whether he was alive or dead,” Rammohan says, with a visible relief.
“We watched the news of his arrest on TV. We are relieved,” he said over the phone. The man he was referring to is none other than Sadanala Ramakrishna, his elder brother and the head of the Maoist central technical committee arrested two days back in Kolkata.
“He did not come when our father, Sadula Venkataiah, passed away in 1998. Even at our mother Ramakka’s death, in 2005, there was no trace of him. We’ve had no word from him in the last 28 years,” he said.
Rammohan, who used to run a small clothes shop in Karimnagar district’s Husnabad town, said his brother had worked as an executive engineer with the panchayat raj wing in the early ’80s and been instrumental in laying a water pipeline to their village. Rammohan’s wife Dhanalakshmi works as a bus conductor with APSRTC in Husnabad.
Rammohan said that his brother was idealistic from a youthful age but never did they think that he would end up in the Naxal movement.
Son of agriculturists in Anthakkapeta village, which lies at a distance of 55 km from Karimnagar, Ramakrishna studied in Warangal up to standard XII and did his mechanical engineering at the Warangal Regional Engineering College in 1966-70.
He got his M.Tech from Osmania University in 1970-72 and, after a brief stint with a private firm in Khammam’s Palvoncha, worked as an assistant engineer with BHEL till 1978. The tenure with the panchayat raj wing followed before he quit his job to go underground in early ’84.
“Ramakrishna was very driven even as a schoolboy. He was mild-mannered but showed great conviction on issues affecting society,” recalled Sathaiah. Sathaiah, a former teacher, was a classmate of Ramakrishna’s in Warangal.
“Later, we heard about him having joined the naxalites. He was known as Yerranna,” Hanumantha Reddy of Husnabad sa0id. Reddy, too, had studied with Ramakrishna. Police officials said that Ramakrishna is a contemporary of Karimnagar Maoist leaders Sayini Prabhakar and Ramakantha Rao both of whom were killed in an encounter in the ’90s. It was learnt that most of his peers at REC had joined the movement inspired by Kondapalli Seetharamaiah, founder of the People’s War Group.