Hyderabad: Gummadi Vittal Rao, popularly known as Gaddar passed away on Sunday while undergoing treatment at the Apollo Hospitals in Hyderabad.
“He was suffering from severe heart disease and got admitted on July 20th, 2023. He underwent a bypass surgery on August 3rd, 2023, and recovered from it. However, he is a past patient with lung and urinary problems, which along with his advanced age aggravated and led to his passing away,” an official statement from Apollo Hospitals said.
Born in 1949, he was a poet, revolutionary balladeer, activist, and former Naxalite.
Gaddar was a member of the Naxalite movement until 2010 when he joined the Telangana statehood movement.
He went underground in the 1980s and joined the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), and founded the Jana Natya Mandali, the Communist Party’s cultural wing.
He was shot by unknown perpetrators in 1997, and though he survived, a bullet remained lodged in his spinal cord.
With the revival of the Telangana movement, Gaddar embraced the cause of an independent Telangana State and cut links with the Maoists in 2017, despite the fact that he had not been active as a Maoist since 2010. Gaddar, who had previously considered that voting was pointless, voted for the first time in his life in the 2018 Assembly elections.
Last month, he announced the formation of a new political party, the Gaddar Praja Party, and stated that he will run in the upcoming elections. He had formerly backed the Congress and was more recently linked with evangelist KA Paul’s Praja Shanthi Party.
As news emerged of his demise, condolences poured in from several political leaders across the spectrum.
