Salwa Judum as SPOs: No campaigners of peace

The decision to disband Chhattisgarh’s ‘vigilante force’ of young Special Police Officers to fight the Maoists by the Supreme Court is a lesson for the executive.

By KS Subramanian

The recent historic Supreme Court judgement holding the appointment of ‘Salwa Judum’ cadres as Special Police Officers under the Chhattisgarh Police Act(CPA)2007, a violation of the letter and spirit of Articles 14 and 21 of the Constitution of India comes as a huge political embarrassment to the state and Central governments. Over the last several years, the Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) has been consistently stepping up its financial and moral support to ‘local resistance’ (read ‘Salwa Judum’) against the Maoist struggle.

The judgement has noted that while the Police Act 1861 formulated by the colonial authorities gave the power to appoint Special Police Officers to the District Magistrate (DM) under strict circumstances and conditions on the recommendation of the local police, the subsequent Chhattisgarh Police Act 2007 has empowered the district Superintendent of Police to autonomously make the appointments without any reference to the DM. Further, the 2007 law unlike its predecessor, allows freedom to the district Superintendent of Police to decide how many and whom to appoint.

The core of the judgement lie in its part II and III dealing respectively with ‘brief facts and history of the instant matters’ and ‘appointment and conditions of service of the SPOs’. Appointed under Section 9 of the CPA 2007, SPOs were allegedly meant as guides, spotters, translators and work as a source of intelligence; and fire arms were provided for their ‘self-defence’. They enjoyed the same powers, privileges and perform the same duties as coordinate constabulary; were under the same control, command and supervision as the regular police. They were an ‘auxiliary force’ and ‘force multiplier’ and served a critical role in mitigating the problem of inadequacy of the regular police force. The SPOs became necessary because of the increasing attacks by the Maoists on relief camps and villages. Their training in police manuals and methods and use of fire arms lasted about three months in all. They also made up for the lack of local knowledge on the part of the central police forces inducted into Chhattisgarh from outside and helped with such knowledge.

The Union of India, in an affidavit submitted to the Court held that 83 districts in 9 states were severely affected by Maoist violence and the Union financially supplemented the efforts of the states in maintaining law and order, which was a state subject. An honorarium of Rs 3000 was provided to each SPO at the cost of the Union.

The Supreme Court notes that specific aspects such as the arming of the SPOs; the nature of their training; the duties assigned to them; the meaning of the term ‘force multiplier’ etc. are not explained in the affidavit of the Union of India. Expressing its ‘deepest dismay’ over the Union of India in these matters, the Court comes to the superbly-argued conclusion that both Article 21 and Article 14 have been violated by the appointment of tribal youth with very little education as SPOs engaged in counter insurgency activities.

The judgement raises concerns over the MHA’s tendency to take a mainly law and order and national security approach to complex social scenarios in the country. Traditionally, it is a fact that secret and top secret reports from police agencies, especially the Intelligence Bureau (IB), have predominated over more sensitive reports from other sources including the government’s own Planning Commission. This bizarre situation continues especially with regard to the Maoist movement in Chhattisgarh and other central tribal districts.

The IB has portrayed the Maoist movement as the most serious ‘internal security threat’ in India as opposed to the Planning Commission which has taken a much more balanced approach. Police agencies are not equipped to study the multiple complexities of developmental conflicts but tend to view them through the lens of their security preoccupations. The criminal laws governing the working of the police stress state security concerns over other developmental concerns prioritised in the Constitution of India. Why should police reports prevail over concerns of the Constitution of India? The Supreme Court, to its great credit, has come out very clearly and forcefully in fore-grounding major Constitutional concerns.

In 1967, the MHA did set up its own Research and Policy (R&P) Division to study and report on such conflict situations objectively. The Division worked well for many years generating useful studies. A 1969 report said that the Green Revolution would likely turn into a Red Revolution unless agrarian reforms were carried out. It was placed before Parliament and Indira Gandhi, the then the PM, wrote to state governments stressing the importance of agrarian reforms. Naxalism emerged strongly again in the 1980s and has become more powerful in the current phase of economic liberalisation. However, the R&P Division was mysteriously wound up in the 1990s.

The MHA had the additional responsibility for the development and protection of the Scheduled Castes and Tribes but in the 1990s, in the name of reorganisation, the responsibility was transferred to the newly set up social justice ministry.

MHA says that Maoist violence today affects over 2000 police stations, in 223 districts across 20 states. The police budgets of the Union and state governments have reportedly gone up over a thousand-fold from 1967 to 2007. The annual budget of the MHA has gone up considerably in the recent period — from Rs 23,000 crores to over Rs 38, 000 crores. State violence aggravates the cult of violence but the colonial precedent of using violence to quell violence continues to be followed.

Ironically, the MHA still does not have a binding institutional mechanism for policy making at the top on complex issues. A former home secretary has stated that the ‘‘available expertise at the bureaucratic level to understand, anticipate and evaluate an intricate problem is inadequate and amateurish. The situation in some cases was salvaged in the past because of the flexibility of the system, the sagacity of political leadership and its openness to information from all quarters.” The political response to Moaist violence often attempted an appraisal of the objective socio-economic conditions but once the intensity of violence abated, the standard administrative action of deploying Central paramilitary forces took over. Allegations of fake encounters, illegal arrests and other misdeeds were swept under the carpet. Excessive preoccupation with peace and order, ignoring issues of law and justice, proved expensive. The ad-hocism and amateurishness in this area of policy making can be remedied only by “additional inputs of knowledge, skill and vision through multidisciplinary research and policy analysis.” However, the situation has only got worse in the subsequent years.

It is noteworthy that Dr BD Sharma, distinguished former Commissioner for SCs and STs, a Constitutional Office directly under the President of India, in a recent Open Letter to the President, has  expressed deep concern over the violent situation in the central tribal districts. Even if the conflict is eventually resolved, the consequences of the violence and the wounds remaining in the human survivors and in the national psyche need to be healed and a reasonable degree of ‘closure’ achieved so that the patterns of political violence and terrorism do not re-appear.

(The writer is an ICSSR Senior Fellow at the Council for Social Development, New Delhi)