After being nominated as the INDIA bloc’s candidate for the post of Vice President, Justice B. Sudarshan Reddy has come under attack from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). He is accused of being responsible for Maoist violence in Chhattisgarh because he was part of the Supreme Court bench that banned the state-sponsored Salwa Judum movement.
This campaign, which was presented as an anti-Maoist initiative, resulted in widespread excesses: nearly 650 villages were forcibly evacuated, dozens of villages were burnt, hundreds of women were subjected to sexual violence, and large-scale killings took place.
Over a hundred thousand people were displaced from their homes, thousands remain missing, and security forces carried out massacres of villagers in the name of fighting insurgency. These findings were corroborated in reports of the CBI, the National Human Rights Commission, and the National Commission for Scheduled Tribes, though no officials have been punished. Tribal children and former Maoist cadres were recruited as Special Police Officers (SPOs), effectively pitting Adivasis against Adivasis.
Many argue that the campaign facilitated corporate exploitation of Bastar’s natural resources. Even after the ban on Salwa Judum, allegations of continued exploitation and rights violations remain, with census data showing a decline of more than 2% in the tribal population of Bastar between 2001 and 2011.
Justice Reddy has clarified that the Salwa Judum judgment was not his personal decision but that of the Supreme Court. The judgment is significant because it questioned the constitutionality of state policies that, in the name of suppressing insurgency, ended up violating tribal rights and enabling resource extraction.
The Court cited reports such as the Planning Commission’s study on development challenges in insurgency-affected areas, which highlighted forced displacement and destruction of social and cultural life. Drawing on economist Amit Bhaduri, the Court described this model as “development terrorism,” where the state uses the rhetoric of development while inflicting violence on the poor in the interest of corporate elites.
The Court also noted that from 1950 to 1990, around 21 million people were displaced by development projects, of whom 40% were Adivasis. Only a quarter of them were rehabilitated. With liberalisation and globalisation since the 1990s, displacement has accelerated, reflecting what the Court termed the “dark side of globalisation,” which demands sacrifices from the marginalised, particularly Dalits and Adivasis, for the benefit of the affluent. The Court criticised this model as inhuman and contrary to constitutional values.
Chhattisgarh, which has 23% of India’s iron ore reserves, exemplifies this context. Land acquisition for industries has often involved coercion, with protests facing police repression. In this setting, the Court questioned whether the state was respecting constitutional limits. It concluded that policies violated Articles 14 (equality before law) and 21 (right to life with dignity). Both Maoists and the state were held responsible for rights violations, but the Court rejected the government’s claim that suppressing Maoists gave it a constitutional license to violate rights indefinitely or adopt extremist tactics.
The judgment specifically struck down the use of SPOs, noting that untrained and vulnerable youth—many of them victims of Maoist violence or former Maoists themselves—were being handed guns instead of opportunities for education. This placed them at high risk, with SPO casualty rates significantly higher than regular security forces.
Many SPOs were implicated in loot, arson, and violence, including attacks on villages like Morpalli and Tadmetla, where houses were burnt and atrocities committed. Relief efforts for affected villages, including those led by Swami Agnivesh, were obstructed. The government admitted that 1,200 SPOs were dismissed for indiscipline, but no criminal prosecutions followed.
The Supreme Court ordered disbanding of the SPO system, emphasising that the state could not outsource its constitutional duty of protecting citizens’ lives and rights. The Court’s concern was not only for innocent villagers but also for the SPOs themselves, who were placed in untenable and dangerous conditions. It stressed that appointing such individuals as part of armed forces was unconstitutional.
The verdict was criticised by BJP leaders as judicial overreach into executive functions. Anticipating this, the Court clarified that its intervention was not about security strategy but about ensuring that counterinsurgency policies respected constitutional values and fundamental rights. When the state violates these principles, the judiciary has a duty to step in.
Leaders such as Arun Jaitley earlier called the verdict “ideologically driven,” and today Home Minister Amit Shah has revived similar criticisms. Yet the Court’s reasoning highlighted that the roots of discontent lie not merely in law-and-order issues but in socio-economic policies that marginalise the poor while favouring corporate capital.
The judgment made it clear that the primary responsibility for citizens’ security lies with the government, not with extra-constitutional militias. To criticise the judgment is to dismiss the constitutional principles it was grounded in. The continuing attacks on Justice Reddy for being part of that bench underline the uneasy relationship between constitutional protections and political-economic interests.
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The writer is Vice President of the Chhattisgarh Kisan Sabha, affiliated with the All India Kisan Sabha
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