Misreading the Salwa Judum verdict

THE upcoming Vice-Presidential election, necessitated by the mid-term resignation of Jagdeep Dhankhar, is witnessing a slugfest between the BJP and the Opposition. The NDA candidate, Maharashtra Governor and RSS functionary CP Radhakrishnan, is pitted against INDIA bloc’s Justice B Sudershan Reddy, a retired judge of the Supreme Court (SC).

Union Home Minister Amit Shah launched Radhakrishnan’s campaign with a sharp attack on Justice Reddy over the SC’s July 2011 judgment that scrapped the controversial tribal vigilante group Salwa Judum. Shah accused Justice Reddy of supporting Naxalism, saying that if the judge had not delivered the Salwa Judum verdict, the extremist Left movement in the country would have ended before 2020.

In the Gondi dialect, ‘Salwa Judum’ means a ‘peace march’. The militia was created by the Raman Singh-led BJP government in Chhattisgarh in 2005 to counter Naxalism. The escalating tensions between the Salwa Judum and Naxal groups prompted civil society groups to oppose this ‘avoidable’ conflict. The debate intensified as the apex court struck down the use of tribal youths as a supplementary counter-insurgency force.

Consequently, both the Union and Chhattisgarh governments appealed to a larger SC Bench. There were apprehensions about members of the disbanded militia being targeted by Maoists. The state government promised to absorb former Salwa Judum members into the police force.

In 2007, Nandini Sundar, a professor at Delhi University and a human rights activist, along with historian Ramachandra Guha and others, filed a public interest litigation against Salwa Judum in the Supreme Court. In 2011, a Bench of Justice B Sudershan Reddy and Justice Surinder Singh Nijjar passed a judgment that had two parts, ‘analytical’/explanatory and operative; and two dimensions — political and public security.

In the operative part, the court ordered the state government to discontinue the practice of recruiting Special Police Officers (SPOs) from the Salwa Judum ranks and disband the outfit forthwith. It also restrained the Union of India from funding such an initiative by any state government. Taking into consideration the threat to Salwa Judum members from Maoists as well as the misuse of force by SPOs, the court directed the Chhattisgarh government to recall firearms issued to Salwa Judum. The judgment also declared sections of the Chhattisgarh Police Act, 2007, which provided for the appointment of SPOs, as unconstitutional.

In the second part of the judgment, the SC ordered the state government to prevent a repeat of the violence allegedly committed against Swami Agnivesh and his companions during their visit to Chhattisgarh in March 2011. Further, the CBI was directed to investigate these incidents and submit a preliminary report within six weeks.

The Home Minister has hit out at a portion of the judgment which, according to him, came in the way of ending Naxal violence in Chhattisgarh and across the country. Shah has been making claims after every successful operation of the security forces against Naxal groups that Left-Wing Extremism will be wiped out from India by March 2026. These claims may have some substance, but they have nothing to do with the judgment that Justice Reddy was part of.

Shah has failed to realise that Salwa Judum could never acquire the strength and capacity to resist and repel the Naxals, who were motivated and well-trained in guerrilla warfare, let alone finish them. The members of this militia were never capable of taking on Naxals and suffered from internal contradictions that brought them discredit.

It was an uneducated band, poorly trained in firearms and assault techniques — a poor, unmotivated group of people who had repeatedly turned against the people they were meant to protect. The SC judges were not naïve to disband Salwa Judum to aid Naxals.

The Home Minister appears to have been inadequately briefed on the grounds that had brought criticism to the judgment when it was delivered. Actually, the ‘analytical’/explanatory part had banked on political sociology and economics to analyse the circumstances that had led to the rise and spread of Maoist revolutionary politics in India. Quoting from research and analyses of social scientists — including this author — the judgment had argued that an instrument and strategy such as Salwa Judum would not be able to deal with Naxalism.

The verdict was described as “having the depth of a JNU post-grad writing” by analysts and the media. It was claimed that the major part of the judgment in which the judges quoted extensively from literature on related issues — classical and contemporary — to buttress their arguments offered no solution to the problem that the so-called revolutionary politics posed to Indian society and polity. There were two sets of arguments in the judgment. The first related to poverty and deprivation, particularly of the traditionally dispossessed social groups such as the Adivasis, and the second pertained to public security. Eventually, both got intertwined in the final judgment.

In the first set of arguments, the judgment related deprivation to rebellion that expresses itself in violent, agitational politics, which analysts thought was a rhetorical and ‘dangerous’ rationalisation of Maoist politics in India. But a careful reading of the judgment shows that the judges did not endorse Maoists and did criticise them for human rights violations. The point succinctly made by them is that the State must not act like the Maoists. The Home Minister has missed the point.

Ajay K Mehra is Senior Fellow, Centre for Multilevel Federalism.