The turning point came in 2011, not in the forests of Bastar, but in the imposing courtroom of the Supreme Court in Delhi, where Salwa Judum did not appear as a community movement of desperate citizens but as a legal question stripped of context, history, and lived experience. Petitions filed by activists and civil rights groups framed the movement as unconstitutional: a reckless outsourcing of state power to civilians, a quasi-militia created under the veneer of counterinsurgency.

In court arguments, the pain, fear, and suffocated voices of tribal families rarely entered the record – not because they did not matter, but because the legal system had no mechanism to absorb the emotional truth of lived violence. When the judgment finally came, it was sweeping, stern, and unforgiving. The Supreme Court declared the deployment of Special Police Officers – many of whom were young tribal men trained to protect their villages – as unconstitutional. And with one stroke of the pen, the fragile architecture of Salwa Judum collapsed. Outside courtrooms, the ruling was celebrated by activist circles as a triumph of constitutional morality. But in Dantewada, the reaction was not celebration – it was fear. Camps that had offered protection suddenly felt exposed. Maoists sensed opportunity. The message, deliberately or not, seemed to be that resistance from civilians was no longer legitimate – that Bastar could only be defended by those who lived far from its realities.

The people who had raised their voices for the first time in decades now felt abandoned. A movement that had emerged not as aggression but as survival now stood delegitimized. And in that silenced vacuum, Maoists moved quickly. Villages that had defied insurgent diktats were punished. Many who had fled to government camps were warned not to return home unless they pledged loyalty. The psychological balance shifted once again. The state remained, but its confidence in people’s involvement had vanished. Police forces still operated, but without the granular intelligence networks that only community........

© The Statesman