Vice President elections and the Supreme Court

Transcript: 

Hello everyone and welcome to SCO’s channel. I’m Spandana. Our video today is about the Vice Presidential Elections in 2025 and a Supreme Court decision from 2011. The decision in question, Nandini Sundar versus State of Chhattisgarh. My colleague V. Venkatesan recently wrote that rarely does a Supreme Court Order from 15 years ago resurface as the centerpiece of a political context. But it has happened now because Home Minister Amit Shah recently blamed the decision in Nandini Sundar delaying the elimination of the Maoist problem.

Shah was asked about B. Sudershan Reddy, the INDIA bloc’s pick for the Vice President’s post. Reddy was part of the two judge Bench that decided Nandini Sundar back in 2011. In that case, the court had struck down the Chhattisgarh government’s Salwa Judum initiative. This was centred on recruiting tribal youth as special police officers to combat Maoists. Immediately after Shah’s remarks triggered a split among retired judges. Eighteen of them, including Justices Kurian Joseph, M.B. Lokar and J. Chalameshwar, issued a statement in support of Justice Reddy. They warned that the episode could cause a chilling effect on judicial independence and added that Amit Shah had misinterpreted the order. Soon after, 56 others issued a counter. They warned that endorsements of political candidates risked undermining judicial neutrality.

Although a subsequent Facebook post by journalist Siddharth Varadarajan noted that two of them had denied having signed this counter letter. This group, included ex Chief Justices Rajan Gogoi, who is now a Rajya Sabha member, and P. Sathashivam, who is a former Governor. This counter letter proclaimed that the statement made by the 18 judges cloaked their political partnership under the language of judicial independence. Now one glance at the case file of Nandini Sundar suggests that Shah’s portrayal of the judge as “Pro-Naxal” overlooks the record. The 2011 Order does not condemn the State’s right to use force against Maoists. It merely challenged the idea of arming untrained civilians for this purpose. Also, the matter was formally disposed of only in May this year, when a Bench led by Justice B.V. Nagaratna dismissed a challenge the Chhattisgarh Ancillary Armed Police Force Act, 2011. The petitioners on this case had contended that the legislation revived the Salva Judum under another name. If we are to go back, we should also note that sociologist Nandini Sundar, who filed the original petition, had based her petition on a 2006 fact finding report by the Independent Citizens Initiative.

The Fact Finding Committee had included Harivansh, who went on to write a book chapter where he acknowledged that Naxals inspired certain sections of society. Harivansh is now the Deputy Chairman of the Rajya Sabha and is from the Janata Dal (United) which is a key partner in the ruling coalition led by the Bhartiya Janata Party. Crossed lines such as these are a very important parliamentary democracy and who has followed Indian politics for the past decade or so. A revision of pleading of a past judgment in the hint of an electoral protest shouldn’t really come as a surprise. In this same period you would have seen retired judges attaching their names to issues that make headlines. Sorry spoke in 2022 after the judge had remarked that a BJP spokesperson’s comments about Prophet Muhammad had set the entire country on fire. Retired judges were amongst those who signed an open letter criticizing the Court’s observations as judicial overreach.

More recently, in April 2024, a group of 21 retired judges wrote to then Chief Justice DY Chandrachore about the need to safeguard the judiciary from unwarranted pressure in the present instance. In response to Shah’s comments, Justice Reddy noted that he may have authored the 2011 order, but it was the Supreme Court which is speaking in the same interview. He accused the BJP of trying to set up a narrative and said that the vice presidential election had become an ideological fight. But again, when has it not been, at least in recent memory? This kind of sparring is at par with the cause. The only overreach here is of those who wouldn’t engage with the actual order. There is nothing preventing judges from becoming political actors once they demit office. Even those who say they are running for an office which is not political, as Justice Reddy has know that they may be called upon to defend their judgments in the public domain. What they and their rivals say in this context should be taken in the political spirit. The verdicts themselves will continue to live on in public record and so will an account of the time when they were pronounced.

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