Amit Shah Should Know Salwa Judum Helped – Not Hurt – the Naxal Cause
Nalini Ranjan Mohanty
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It beggars the imagination that the home minister of the country, no less, would accuse retired Supreme Court judge Justice B. Sudershan Reddy of supporting Naxalism. Amit Shah, speaking at a public function in Kochi, said on Friday, “Sudershan Reddy is the person who helped Naxalism. He gave Salwa Judum judgment. If the Salwa Judum judgment had not been given, the Naxal terrorism would have ended by 2020. He is the person who was inspired by the ideology that gave Salwa Judum judgment.”
It’s such an outlandish statement that one is not sure if the home minister seriously believes in the very charge he is making against Justice Reddy. If he does, then that would unfortunately suggest our home minister has little grasp on India's realities. Such an inference would have ominous implications for our country.
But if Shah was just indulging in glib talk, taking a potshot at Justice Reddy after he was named as the vice presidential candidate of the opposition parties, then it may be dismissed as an off-the-cuff remark. Still, the Union home minister talking in such a cavalier fashion publicly does not befit the office.
What was the Salwa Judum issue that the home minister flagged? The Bharatiya Janata Party government in Chhattisgarh, in 2005, resorted to an egregious and patently illegal policy of forming a private gang of armed men, calling the gang members Special Police Officers, and using them to counter Naxalites in the Bastar region. This arrangement came to be known as Salwa Judum; it created a combustible environment in tribal villages, with violent clashes taking place frequently between the well-armed militia members and villagers who were suspected to be sympathisers of the Naxal cause. Hundreds of unarmed villagers were at the receiving end of the militia’s fury. Villagers belonging to Salwa Judum gang too fell a prey to armed Naxal groups. Hundreds were killed, several villages were burnt and thousands of tribals were displaced in the mayhem that rocked the Bastar region after the onset of the Salwa Judum campaign.
Nandini Sundar, a well-known sociologist then working in the Bastar area, was moved by the plight of the tribals and moved the Supreme Court questioning the basis of the illegitimate operations. Many other public-spirited individuals and organisations followed suit.
On March 31, 2008, a bench of Chief Justice Balakrishnan and Justice Aftab Alam expressed their dismay over the developments in Bastar. The CJI said that state support to Salwa Judum would amount to abetting crime; Justice Alam too said that the matter was of grave concern. On April 15 that year, the Supreme Court asked the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) to form an enquiry committee. Several different benches headed by CJI Balakrishnan considered the matter and gave various directives over the next three years. After Chief Justice Balakrishnan retired, Justice Sudershan Reddy and Justice S.S. Nijjar started hearing the unfinished matter and delivered the judgment on July 5, 2011.
The Justices Reddy-Nijjar bench declared the Chhattisgarh government’s Salwa Judum policy unconstitutional and observed: "The State cannot outsource its duties to untrained vigilantes; this violates Article 14 and Article 21, including the right to life of SPOs as well as rights of villagers who had become victims of Salwa Judum policy. Such rapacious state policies do not counter Naxalism, they encourage Naxalism.”
A review petition of the judgment filed by the Union of India came up before a three-judge bench headed by Justice Altamas Kabir; Justice Nijjar and Justice Gyan Sudha Mishra were also part of the bench. On November 11, 2011, the Justice Kabir-led bench reaffirmed the judgment delivered by Justice Reddy and Justice Nijjar.
Here is a question for the honourable home minister: was it that all those judges of the Supreme Court — K.G. Balakrishnan, Aftab Alam, S S Nijjar, Altamas Kabir, Gyan Sudha Mishra — who concurred with Justice Sudershan Reddy in striking down the Salwa Judum policy, were all afflicted by pro-Naxal ideology?
If the home minister would not have been swayed by the false saffron propaganda, he would have realised that a patently illegal policy like Salwa Judum was an unwitting benefactor of the Naxal movement. This is very much corroborated by retired IPS officer R.K. Vij, who had served as the Inspector General of Police of Bastar range during 2006-08. He told the Indian Express, “Salwa Judum benefitted Naxals as they started recruiting villagers who got divided due to the movement. The movement helped Naxals to form multiple companies and platoons. The villagers joined the Maoist movement not because they were politically driven but because the villages got divided over Salwa Judum.”
Subhranshu Choudhary, the well-known peace activist working in Bastar area, echoed similar sentiments to the newspaper: “The forced migration of villagers accelerated after the creation of Salwa Judum… Today, in around 300 villages/forest settlements in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, around 90 percent of villagers are those who went there post-Salwa Judum when the conflict intensified in the Bastar region.”
One would hope that the home minister would realise that a mafia approach to law and order is counter-productive. Unfortunately, in today's India, that seems to be very far from the truth.
Nalini Ranjan Mohanty is a senior journalist and the former Editor of Hindustan Times, Patna.
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