In an interview published in the weekly magazine Open, Mupalla Laxman Rao, better known as Ganapathi, said any offensive might secure some early gains but insisted that the rebels would eventually triumph.

"Although the enemy may achieve a few successes in the initial phase, we shall certainly overcome and defeat the government offensive," Ganapathi was quoted as saying in the magazine's latest edition.

Open said the interview was conducted at an undisclosed jungle location in eastern India, part of a vast, Maoist-affected region known as the "red corridor".

The corridor includes areas of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Bihar and West Bengal states, and runs south through Orissa, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh.

The states' police and paramilitary forces will be in the frontline of the planned anti-rebel offensive, which official sources say is likely to begin in November and involve hundreds of thousands of security personnel.

Ganapathi, a 59-year-old former school teacher, said the operation would provoke a mass response.

"People will rise up like a tornado under our party's leadership to wipe out the reactionary blood-sucking vampires ruling our country," he said, branding Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Home Minister P. Chidambaram "terrorists".

Singh has described the Maoist insurgency, which began as a peasant uprising in 1967, as the single greatest threat to India's internal security.

The Maoists say they are fighting for the rights of the rural poor and local tribes, but officials accuse them of using intimidation and extortion to collect money and to control impoverished villagers.

"This region is the wealthiest as well as the most underdeveloped part of our country," said Ganapathi, who is one of the most wanted men in India and is known to change his location frequently.

"These (government) sharks want to loot the wealth and drive the tribal people of the region to further impoverishment," he said.

Maoist-linked violence has already claimed more than 600 lives this year with rebels staging a series of raids against police targets, despite some successes by security forces in arresting or killing a number of senior cadres.

"It is true that our party has suffered some serious leadership losses, but we were able to inflict serious losses on the enemy too," the rebel leader said.

"Overall, our party's influence has grown stronger and it has now come to be recognised as the only genuine alternative before the people," he added.

Last month, the prime minister rebuked regional police chiefs for failing to stem the insurgency, but analysts say the real problem has been the lack of a cohesive strategy.

Although the federal government has ruled out the use of the military in the anti-Maoist offensive, it has made it clear that the operation will be coordinated from New Delhi.

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