The court stressed that vigilante militias could not be legitimised in a Constitutional democracy, and that India’s international obligations under humanitarian law demanded protection — not endangerment — of its citizens.

Human rights groups had at the time documented how armed Salwa Judum vigilantes were implicated in mass displacement, village burnings and atrocities against Adivasi communities. The Court’s intervention was therefore not abstract but a direct response to widespread rights violations carried out under the state’s watch.

Ahead of the vice-presidential election on 9 September — which ruling NDA candidate C.P. Radhakrishnan is expected to comfortably win — the political context of Shah’s accusation is unmissable. The home minister has sought to weaponise a decade-old ruling to paint Reddy as sympathetic to extremists, despite the court having only struck down the illegal arming of untrained civilians.

The irony, critics point out, is that the Modi government itself has since relied on the very same Constitutional reasoning in other security contexts — resisting demands for parallel ‘civil defence’ militias in Kashmir and in the North-East by stressing that only the state has the authority to exercise legitimate force.

Reddy was unanimously chosen as the INDIA bloc vice-presidential candidate earlier this week after a round of deliberations. During his four-and-a-half years on the Supreme Court bench, he delivered several trenchant orders, including a 2011 directive days before his retirement that castigated the Union government for failing to pursue black money cases.

That ruling, which established a Special Investigation Team to trace illicit wealth stashed abroad, is now being cited by the BJP to argue that even Reddy had found fault with the Congress-led UPA. In his chat with The Hindu, Justice Reddy dismissed the suggestion of political bias, stressing that “Prime Minister Manmohan Singh never directly or indirectly interfered with my work”.