Does Amit Shah consider Supreme Court judges to be Maoist?

The union home minister Amit Shah may not have read the judgment or may have been wrongly briefed, says an unruffled Justice (retd) B. Sudershan Reddy in separate interviews to the media. He was referring to Amit Shah’s barb on Friday, 22 August 2025 when the home minister declared, “Sudershan Reddy is the person who helped Naxalism. He delivered the Salwa Judum judgment. If that judgement had not been passed, Naxal terrorism would have ended by 2020”.

The Supreme Court never stopped the government from waging a war against Naxalites, the retired judge points out. The court had merely reminded the government that protecting people was its responsibility; that it could not outsource that responsibility to others.

It was the state which has the authority to use coercive power but it cannot lend that power to a group of people. The retired judge recalled that there was his brother judge on the bench, late Justice S.S. Nijjar, who concurred with the judgment and he did not add even a comma or a full stop.

By indirectly supporting the Salwa Judum initiative, the home minister appeared to suggest that it was a legitimate exercise and constitutionally right for the government to arm a section of citizens to take on another group of citizens; that instead of letting the police and the uniformed force to deal with violence, it is fine for the government to arm civilians and pit them against the outlaws. This kind of logic is shocking, point out members of the legal fraternity.

Shiv Sena (UBT) spokesperson Sanjay Raut attributed the home minister’s barb to growing uneasiness in the government over chances of cross-voting in the vice-presidential election slated for 9 September, 2025. Justice (rtd) Reddy, the opposition’s candidate, has also stoked the unease in NDA ranks by pointing out that the VP is elected by MPs and not parties. The party whip does not apply to MPs in the vice presidential election in which all members of the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha are eligible to cast their vote.

Dipankar Bhattacharya, the CPI(ML) general secretary, issued a statement on Saturday and listed as many as 24 Supreme Court judges, among them several Chief Justices of India, who heard the Salwa Judum case and appeals against the 2011 order delivered by Justice Reddy and Justice Nijjar between 2007 and 2025.

Amit Shah has now started attacking Justice B Sudarshan Reddy for the 2011 Supreme Court verdict declaring Salwa Judum unconstitutional. The judgement has been in line with several verdicts of the apex court during 2007-25. Does Amit Shah consider the Supreme Court Maoist? pic.twitter.com/8A0TMT92GF

— Dipankar (@Dipankar_cpiml) August 23, 2025

They included Justices Tarun Chatterjee, Ravindran, Aftab Alam, P. Sathasivam, Kapadia, Ranjan Gogoi, Chalameshwar, Kalifulla, Madan Lokur, Bobde and U.U. Lalit among others. In fact it was on 15 May, 2025 that a bench comprising Justice B.V. Nagarathna and Justice Satish Mishra upheld the 2011 judgment delivered by Justice B. Sudershan Reddy.

Does Amit Shah consider the Supreme Court as Maoist, asks Bhattacharya. The statement issued by him points out that none of the Supreme Court benches took an adverse view of the 2011 judgment.

In fact most of the directions passed by the Supreme Court have been in line with the 2011 judgment declaring Salwa Judum, the vigilante group of tribals armed by the government to fight against Naxalites, unconstitutional. For the union home minister to suggest that it was alright for the state to arm a group of citizens to kill another group of citizens is shocking, is the consensus among lawyers and politicians.

In an interview to The Hindu published on Sunday, 24 August, Justice Reddy said he did not want to join issue with Amit Shah Shah, since a Supreme Court judgment was not meant for public debate. “Whatever its merits may be, there are acceptable standards to review a judgement and make a comment upon that,” he said. He said Mr. Shah perhaps had not read the judgment and was wrongly briefed by someone.

Formation of Salwa Judum was 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 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,” the judgment read.