From Hi-Tec city to educational institution: Ex-Maoists get a tour of Hyderabad’s it heartland after surrender | Hyderabad News

HYDERABAD: Batches of surrendered CPI (Maoist) leaders and cadres brought to Hyderabad were quietly driven through Hi-Tec City, Gachibowli and Financial District – past high-rises, wide roads and steady traffic, where people moved with purpose and routine. The idea, police said, was to show them what ‘development’ looks like in real time.For many, it was their first encounter with a city after years – for some after decades – in the forests. Some officers said a few had not seen an urban landscape like Hyderabad for more than 10 years, others for as long as four decades. The tours were designed not as spectacle, but as exposure – neighbourhoods that expanded while they stayed underground, and a daily life they had known only in fragments. A police official told TOI that each batch was taken out for about a week, largely across west Hyderabad. “We arranged a week-long tour for each batch, mostly in western parts of the city. We even took them to multiplexes to watch films,” the official said. The itinerary included evening visits during peak hours to Sharat City Mall in Gachibowli and Inorbit Mall in Madhapur, when crowds spilled into corridors and food courts and queues formed outside stores. Police officials said the intention was to let them observe the scale of urban life – the routines of a mainstream world shaped by office hours, salaries and deadlines, not sentries, guns and secrecy.Chandranna’s reality checkAmong those taken through the city were senior surrendered leaders, including Pulluri Prasad Rao alias Chandranna, a Maoist central committee member, and Koyyada Sambaiah of the Telangana state committee, as well as cadres from the two large groups that surrendered in Nov and Dec, police said. For Chandranna, the week in the city became a moment of reckoning. “There have been major social, cultural, and economic changes in the country. It’s good that many jobs have been created in the IT sector. But computers alone cannot give everyone work. The govt must address unemployment,” he told TOI.A senior police official said an educational institution was also part of the tour. “We took them to an educational institution and spoke to them about why education matters, and how it can help their children,” the official told TOI. The exposure extended beyond consumer spaces. The groups were taken on short rides on Hyderabad Metro Rail, a compressed lesson in the city’s pace – tapping cards, boarding coaches, watching doors slide shut, and moving on. Some batches were also taken to Tank Bund, and to the legislative assembly and secretariat buildings – institutions of the state they once fought. There were quieter, personal moments too. New clothes were given to the cadres, and a photo shoot was arranged. Officers said this was not treated as documentation for police records, but as a symbolic break from the sameness of life in hiding – photographs they could keep for themselves.