NIA court convicts all 10 accused in the 2013 Jhiram Valley ambush

A special National Investigation Agency court in Jagdalpur on Saturday convicted all 10 accused who stood trial for the 25 May 2013 ambush in Jhiram Valley. Judge Ajay Singh Rajput delivered the verdict. Sentences will be announced on 16 September. The 10 convicts are held in Jagdalpur Central Jail.

They are Pramila Modiyam, Chaitu Lekam alias Munna, Sumita alias Punem Modiyam, Mukka Mandvi, Kosa Kavasi alias Kosaram, Aayata Markam, Madkami Deva, Joga Madkami, Banjami Snna alias Chamru and Mahadev Nag. One of the original 11 accused died during the case. Three of those convicted are women.

The attack hit a Congress convoy on the highway under Darbha police station in Bastar. Maoist units fired from the tree line. The dead included state Congress president Nand Kumar Patel, former Leader of the Opposition Mahendra Karma, and former Union minister Vidya Charan Shukla. Published tallies of the dead range from 27 to 32, depending on whether later deaths in hospital are counted. Security agencies still treat the ambush as one of the worst single days of left-wing extremist violence in the state.

The NIA filed its first chargesheet and, on 28 September 2015, a supplementary chargesheet against 30 more people. The trial ran more than a decade and listed at least 294 hearings. Final arguments ended this month. The court had briefly deferred the judgment before listing it for 5 September.

Several of the better-known names on the wider chargesheet were not in the dock on Saturday. Thippiri Tirupathi alias Devuji, a Politburo member, surrendered in Telangana in February. Barse Deva, who took over Battalion 1 after Madvi Hidma, surrendered in January. Ganesh Uikey, a Central Committee member, was killed in an encounter in Odisha in December 2025. The men and women convicted today were the ones the agency could hold and try.

Jhiram changed Chhattisgarh politics. Karma had led the Salwa Judum campaign against the Maoists. Patel was the face of the Congress in the state. Shukla was a national figure who happened to be in the convoy. The party's Bastar network did not recover its old shape. The memorial at the site is a political station as much as a grave marker.

The Maoist organisation that planned the ambush is weaker than it was in 2013. Senior commanders are dead or in custody. Battalion 1 has been hunted through south Bastar and across the Odisha border. The conviction does not end that war. It closes one file that families have watched for 13 years.

Sentencing on 16 September will decide whether the 10 receive life terms or death. Indian courts have used both in massacre cases. The NIA will argue for the maximum. Defence lawyers will point to the long pre-trial custody and to the fact that the top commanders were never in this courtroom.

For the Congress, the verdict is late justice with a hole in it. The people who pulled the triggers in the forest may be in jail. The people who gave the order, on the party's own telling, are not. That gap will be the sentence-day argument, and it will be the political argument that follows.

Bastar in 2013 was a war zone with a highway running through it. Party workers still travel that road. They will do so on 16 September with a judgment in their pocket and with the knowledge that Hidma's successors, even in surrender or in a grave in Odisha, never sat in Rajput's court. The law can only sentence the people it held. The politics of Jhiram will go on treating the missing commanders as unfinished business.