New Delhi: Union home minister Amit Shah’s recent remarks against the former Supreme Court judge and the opposition’s candidate for the vice-president’s post, B. Sudershan Reddy, lead to some inferential questions.

Have most of the Supreme Court judges for two decades been “Maoists”?

Is India’s apex court being run by sympathisers of the proscribed Maoist organisation?

Shah accused the former judge of “supporting Naxalism [a term used interchangeably with Maoism]” because he had delivered a judgment in July 2011 that had declared the private militia Salwa Judum illegal.

However, as per the Union government's own data, Bastar turned into a bloodied battlefield only after the Salwa Judum was formed and, though it may not suggest any inevitable causation, violence began declining after the Salwa Judum judgement in 2011.

Shah has ignored the fact that not only did Justice Reddy co-author the Salwa Judum judgment with Justice Surinder Singh Nijjar, over 20 Supreme Court judges have also heard petitions related to the Salwa Judum from 2008 to 2025.

None of them had made any favourable remarks about the Salwa Judum – and all the judges who have spoken subsequent to the July 2011 judgment upheld its observations.

Major observations by the Supreme Court

The Salwa Judum began in the summer of 2005, when the BJP government in Chhattisgarh handed weapons to Adivasi youths. Several concerned citizens went to the Supreme Court and sought an end to the government-sponsored private militia.

Since then, the apex court had taken a consistent stand against arming private persons on the pretext of fighting insurgency.  

On March 31, 2008, a bench comprising the then-Chief Justice of India K.G. Balakrishnan and Justice Aftab Alam told the Chhattisgarh government: “You cannot supply arms to private citizens and encourage them to take law into their hands. This is the responsibility of the state to maintain law and order and also to safeguard the lives and properties of its citizens.”

The court added that giving arms to a civilian and allowing them to kill would make the government an abettor of the offence under Section 302.

A fortnight later, on April 15, the Supreme Court asked the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) to form an enquiry committee into human rights violations by the Salwa Judum and submit a report within eight weeks.

The court later asked the Chhattisgarh government to submit an action taken report on the NHRC's findings, which had pointed to incidents of burnings and killings involving the Salwa Judum on which FIRs were not registered. Subsequently, in April 2009, the Chhattisgarh government assured the Supreme Court of action on the NHRC report.

By then, the matter had already been heard by CJI Balakrishnan, Justice Tarun Chatterjee, Justice Raveendran, Justice Aftab Alam, Justice P. Sathasivam and Justice B.C. Chauhan.

In 2010, the Supreme Court asked the petitioners to submit a comprehensive plan for victims of the state and Maoist violence.

Following the long court battle, in July 2011, the Supreme Court ordered the appointment of the Special Police Officers or SPOs “unconstitutional”, and ordered the Chhattisgarh and the Union government to “cease and desist, forthwith, from using any of its funds in supporting, directly or indirectly the recruitment of SPOs for the purposes of engaging in any form of counter-insurgency activities against Maoist/Naxalite groups”.

The court ordered, “The State of Chhattisgarh shall forthwith make every effort to recall all firearms issued to any of the SPOs, whether current or former, along with any and all accoutrements and accessories issued to use such firearms,” and “shall take all appropriate measures to prevent the operation of any group, including but not limited to Salwa Judum and Koya Commandos, that in any manner or form seek to take law into private hands, act unconstitutionally or otherwise violate the human rights of any person.”

Since then, the above judgment delivered by Justices Reddy and Nijjar had been taken up in the apex court, by several benches. Each of them upheld the ruling that arming the Salwa Judum had been unconstitutional.

The earliest petitions against the Salwa Judum were heard by a bench of former CJI Balakrishnan and Justices Chatterjee and R.V. Raveendran in 2007, and the latest were heard on May 15 this year, when Justice B.V. Nagarathna and Justice Satish Sharma upheld the July 2011 order and noted that it had “crystallised” the entire matter.

The bench noted, “We find that having regard to the situation that has emerged over the decades in the State of Chhattisgarh, it is necessary that specific steps are taken so as to bring about peace and rehabilitation of the areas requiring the attention of the State as well as the Central Government who would have to act in a coordinated manner. We note that it is duty of the State of Chhattisgarh as well as the Union of India, having regard to Article 315 of the Constitution, to take adequate steps for bringing about peace and rehabilitation to the residents of State of Chhattisgarh who have been affected by the violence from whatever quarter it may have arisen.”

It can, thus, be inferred that the observations and interventions of various apex court judges since 2007 organically led to the July 2011 judgment, which was upheld by the subsequent benches.

Shah's assertion that Justice Reddy “helped Naxalism” from the “pious forum” of the Supreme Court could bring the entire top judiciary under the ambit of his remark.

Maoist violence turned bloody after Salwa Judum: government data

During his recent statement, the home minister made another misleading remark. Shah claimed that “If that [July 2011] judgement had not been passed, Naxal terrorism would have ended by 2020.”

The home minister seems to have completely missed a chapter of Maoist history. The data with his own ministry would show that Maoism was confined to some pockets of Bastar till 2005, and turned bloody and gory only after the Salwa Judum was formed.

Maoist violence saw a sudden and steep spike and the forests of Bastar became lethal battlegrounds only after the then-chief minister Raman Singh's government employed local Adivasis in its fight against the insurgency. Many who have watched developments closely found that atrocities committed by Salwa Judum fighters on fellow Adivasis prompted them to join the Maoist ranks in massive numbers.

It may be hard to establish causation, but the data makes it clear that violence and killings actually saw a downward trend from 2011, the year of the Salwa Judum judgment.

A July 2023 Press Information Bureau release about incidents of left-wing extremism says that while the year 2004 recorded 566 deaths, it increased to 677 in 2005, 721 in 2007, 908 in 2009, and 1,005 in 2010, before the decline began in 2011 with 611 deaths, 415 deaths in 2012, 310 in 2014, 230 in 2015, 202 in 2019, 147 in 2021, and 98 in 2022.

“During the period from 2004 to 2014 there were 17,679 LWE related incidents and 6,984 deaths. During the period from 2014 to 2023 (till 15 June 23) there have been 7,649 LWE related incidents and 2,020 deaths,” the PIB release noted.

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