Gouri Kudiyam, 30, remembers her husband Anil Punem fondly. They met on the job in the dense forests of Bijapur in Chhattisgarh’s Bastar district and married in 2022. They had trekked, cooked, and faced bullets together. Until 2025, when Punem was killed in an encounter with security forces. On January 15 this year, Kudiyam, like hundreds of other Maoist cadres, surrendered before the police. All Kudiyam has of Punem is a photograph from their wedding day, saved as her phone’s wallpaper.

“We could marry but not have children. All the cadres had to undergo vasectomy on the instructions of senior leaders,” she says. She thinks back to what made her join the Maoists: “I was impressed by their dancing and singing troupes. I joined them when I was 16.”