Justice Reddy sets the record straight on Amit Shah’s claim

Opposition INDIA bloc vice-presidential candidate Justice (retd) B. Sudershan Reddy on Saturday underlined that the Supreme Court never stopped the government from combating Maoist violence, but made clear that the state cannot abdicate its Constitutional responsibility to protect its people.

The retired Supreme Court judge was responding to Union home minister Amit Shah’s extraordinary claim that Reddy’s 2011 judgment on the state-sponsored vigilante movement Salwa Judum had strengthened Naxalism and prevented its eradication. The accusation, laced with political venom, has been widely criticised as a distortion of both the judgment and Constitutional principle.

Speaking to The Hindu in Delhi, Justice Reddy declined to be drawn into a tit-for-tat with Shah. “Whatever its merits may be, there are acceptable standards to review a judgement and make a comment upon that,” he said, noting that court rulings were not designed for political point-scoring.

He added that Shah appeared to be either misinformed or had not actually read the ruling. The landmark July 2011 judgment, co-authored with Justice S.S. Nijjar, had described Salwa Judum as an “abdication of Constitutional responsibilities of the state to provide appropriate security to citizens by having an appropriately trained professional police force of sufficient numbers and properly equipped on a permanent basis”.

The judgment also affirmed a fundamental principle: “The state alone has the exclusive right to use violence…. it is the state alone that can use that power. It cannot be used against the targeted group through another instrumentality… the state cannot outsource its power.”

At its core, the judgment rested on Articles 14 and 21 of the Constitution: the right to equality before law and the right to life and personal liberty. By arming barely trained civilians and pitting them against their own communities, Salwa Judum not only violated these fundamental rights but also undermined the state’s monopoly over lawful force.

The court stressed that vigilante militias could not be legitimised in a Constitutional democracy, and that India’s international obligations under humanitarian law demanded protection — not endangerment — of its citizens.

Human rights groups had at the time documented how armed Salwa Judum vigilantes were implicated in mass displacement, village burnings and atrocities against Adivasi communities. The Court’s intervention was therefore not abstract but a direct response to widespread rights violations carried out under the state’s watch.

Ahead of the vice-presidential election on 9 September — which ruling NDA candidate C.P. Radhakrishnan is expected to comfortably win — the political context of Shah’s accusation is unmissable. The home minister has sought to weaponise a decade-old ruling to paint Reddy as sympathetic to extremists, despite the court having only struck down the illegal arming of untrained civilians.

The irony, critics point out, is that the Modi government itself has since relied on the very same Constitutional reasoning in other security contexts — resisting demands for parallel 'civil defence' militias in Kashmir and in the North-East by stressing that only the state has the authority to exercise legitimate force.

Reddy was unanimously chosen as the INDIA bloc vice-presidential candidate earlier this week after a round of deliberations. During his four-and-a-half years on the Supreme Court bench, he delivered several trenchant orders, including a 2011 directive days before his retirement that castigated the Union government for failing to pursue black money cases.

That ruling, which established a Special Investigation Team to trace illicit wealth stashed abroad, is now being cited by the BJP to argue that even Reddy had found fault with the Congress-led UPA. In his chat with The Hindu, Justice Reddy dismissed the suggestion of political bias, stressing that “Prime Minister Manmohan Singh never directly or indirectly interfered with my work”.

The BJP has also sought to revive old controversies over his brief stint as Goa Lokayukta, alleging that he was a pliant figure under then chief minister Manohar Parrikar. Reddy countered that he only accepted the role after the law was amended to bring the chief minister within its ambit and to ensure the Lokayukta had its own independent investigating team. “The first notice the Lokayukta’s office issued was against Parrikar,” he recalled, rejecting suggestions that Congress criticism was what cut short his tenure.

Though Radhakrishnan is seen as the frontrunner in the two-member race for vice-president, Reddy insisted that numbers were not the only factor. “I have never entertained the idea that this is a losing battle… I would appeal to the Members of Parliament to consider my candidature on its own merits and take an appropriate decision.”

He said it was the BJP that had turned the contest explicitly ideological. “They started proudly proclaiming that here is a candidate [Mr. Radhakrishnan] who joined the RSS at 15 years of age and therefore, this would be an ideological fight. It is only then I responded that it is true... it is going to be an ideological fight between a liberal constitutional democrat and a quintessential RSS person.”

On the issue of caste enumeration, Reddy reiterated his long-standing position that a comprehensive caste census was essential to frame equitable policies. “How would you formulate your social, economic and political policies unless you have the details of the weaker sections of the society?” he asked.

As chair of the Expert Group on the Telangana Caste Census, he had already drafted a 43-question framework, which he suggested could serve as a template for the national count. The caste census data, he said, must be made public, as “the concept of fraternity as imagined in the Indian Constitution will be achieved only if the caste count is done.”

With agency inputs