How UPA failed a people’s movement

Tuhin A Sinha

The Statesman

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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 participation could provide. Maoists may have lost some territory in the earlier years, but now they regained something far more crucial – fear.

In Delhi’s power circles, the government could have challenged the judgment. It could have sought a review, or at least presented a framework to restructure rather than dismantle community resistance. But the UPA government, already uncomfortable with the optics of a civilian uprising against Maoists, chose silence. There was no appeal. No legislative framework. No attempt to salvage the progress made. The government watched the shutdown from a distance, as though it were merely a footnote in policy rather than a lifeline for thousands. And within this vacuum of political hesitation and judicial absolutism, Mahendra Karma stood increasingly isolated. He had become, by then, a symbol – one that Maoists deeply despised. To them, he represented betrayal, resistance, and worst of all, agency. He had shown tribals that fear could be broken. And for an ideology that sustains itself on domination, that was an unforgivable sin. By 2012, Maoist messaging in the region made one point repeatedly: Mahendra Karma must die. Yet Karma did not retreat. If anything, the judgment and subsequent delegitimization of the movement hardened his resolve. He travelled, met villagers, and spoke openly about how the fight against Maoism could not depend only on police and paramilitary deployments.

He warned that the retreat of the people’s movement would allow Maoists to regroup – a prediction that would soon manifest in the bloodiest way imaginable. The assassination came on May 25, 2013, during the infamous Darbha Valley ambush – one of the most brutal attacks ever carried out by Maoists. A convoy of Congress leaders travelling through Bastar was trapped, surrounded and targeted with premeditated precision. Landmines exploded. Automatic weapons fired from multiple directions. There was no escape. Witnesses later confirmed what Maoists themselves proudly declared: Mahendra Karma was the primary target. He was dragged out alive so he could be killed slowly – as punishment, as spectacle, and as message. His body was pierced with bullets, his skull smashed, and his death stage-managed as ideological vengeance. A man who had dared mobilise people against Maoist tyranny was denied even the dignity of a quick death. With Karma’s killing, the movement lost its spine. The one voice that had combined political legitimacy, moral resolve and ground credibility was silenced.

In Bastar, the reaction was sombre – not just grief, but something deeper: the kind of quiet resignation that comes when hope collapses. Villagers whispered that Salwa Judum had been dismantled twice – once in court, and once in the valley of Darbha. What made it worse was the political aftermath. Instead of acknowledging Maoist brutality or the strategic mistake of abandoning community participation, sections of political opposition and ideological activists resumed criticism – not of the ambush, but of Karma himself. His assassination was not treated as the killing of an Indian leader fighting extremism; instead, it was rationalised, analysed, and in some corners disturbingly justified as “political consequence.” It was as if the war against Maoism had ceased being a national security issue and had instead become an intellectual debate where tribal lives were footnotes. Years later, as the memory of Salwa Judum faded from national memory, a new shock arrived – this time political, not violent.

In 2025, the Congress party nominated Justice Sudarshan Reddy – the very judge who had authored the 2011 verdict shutting down Salwa Judum – as its Vice-Presidential candidate. For many watching the evolution of Bastar and the patterns of political signalling, that nomination was not merely symbolic – it was telling. To those who had lived through the struggle, suffered Maoist violence, and watched the movement collapse under judicial and political pressure, the nomination felt like a full circle closure of a long era of indifference, perhaps even appeasement. A judge who had halted India’s only organic civilian uprising against Naxalism was now elevated by the party that had refused to defend it. To many in Bastar, it was not just irony – it was painful confirmation that their suffering had never truly mattered to those who romanticised Maoist insurgency as ideological rebellion rather than terror.

(This is an extract from the writer’s new book, Naxal Terror Vanquished.)

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How UPA failed a people’s movement

Tuhin A Sinha

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