Chhattisgarh High Court upholds acquittal in 2010 Tadmetla Naxal attack that killed 76 personnel

A division bench led by Chief Justice Ramesh Sinha dismissed the State's acquittal appeal in the Tadmetla / Chintalnar case, finding the prosecution had failed to identify the accused, produce an FSL report on the seized explosives, or conduct a Test Identification Parade.

The Chhattisgarh High Court has dismissed the State's appeal against the acquittal of eight Naxalite suspects tried for the 6 April 2010 Tadmetla ambush in which 75 CRPF personnel and one State Police constable were killed. A division bench of Chief Justice Ramesh Sinha and Justice Ravindra Kumar Agrawal held that the trial court's acquittal, recorded in 2013, was a possible view on the evidence and could not be described as perverse, even though the loss of life was a matter of profound national concern.

The judgment, delivered on 5 May 2026 in ACQA No. 85 of 2014, comes more than a decade after the State filed the appeal under Section 378(1) of the Code of Criminal Procedure. The neutral citation is 2026:CGHC:20893-DB and the judgment is marked Approved For Reporting.

What is striking about the order is the candour of the Advocate General himself. When the bench asked Vivek Sharma, who appeared with Deputy Advocate General Saurabh Pande, to point to incriminating circumstances, he fairly conceded that all prosecution witnesses had turned hostile and that no witness had identified the accused as perpetrators. He could not explain why the appeal had been filed at all.

The case the trial court had before it

The prosecution case began with CRPF Deputy Commander Satyawan Singh's Area Domination Patrol of 4 to 7 April 2010. On the morning of 6 April, the patrol of 82 personnel was ambushed in the Tadmetla forest near village Chintalnar in Sukma district. Naxalites opened heavy fire; the police returned fire in self-defence. By the end of the engagement, 76 bodies had been scattered, weapons had been looted, and tiffin bombs planted at multiple spots had to be defused. An FIR was registered at Chintagufa police station and the case was committed to the Sessions Court at Dantewada.

The State charged ten accused under Sections 148, 120B and 396 (76 counts) of the Indian Penal Code, Sections 25 and 27 of the Arms Act, and Sections 3 and 5 of the Explosive Substances Act. Two accused, Barse Lakhma and Kartam Joga, died during the proceedings and were deleted from the array. The prosecution led 43 witnesses and exhibited 156 documents. The accused, examined under Section 313 CrPC, denied the charges and led no defence evidence. In January 2013, the Additional Sessions Judge, South Bastar, acquitted them on the ground that the prosecution had failed to prove the case beyond reasonable doubt.

What the bench found missing

The High Court walked through the gaps in the record one at a time. The post-mortem evidence and the testimony of PW-34 Shravan Kumar confirmed that the deaths were homicidal, caused by burns, gunfire and explosion. That established how the personnel died. It did not establish who killed them.

The recorded confession of accused Barse Lakhma under Section 164 CrPC, in which he had implicated himself and others, was uncorroborated by any independent evidence. The seizures spoken to by witnesses Kartam Raju (PW-22), Kawasi Shankar (PW-23) and Madvi Hadma (PW-24) under Ex.P.22 — ten tiffin bombs, five grenades, ten to fifteen metres of wire, empty cartridges and 500 rifle bags — came from the scene of the attack, not from the accused. PW-41 Swaran Singh deposed about the destruction of two tiffin bombs, two pipe bombs, a chloroform grenade and a bug under Ex.P147A.

The bench treated all of this as ineffective for one reason: the FSL report certifying the seized material as explosive had never been produced. Without that certification, the seizure evidence could not establish that the items were in fact explosive substances within the meaning of the Explosive Substances Act, 1908.

To this the bench added several investigative failures. There was no record of the prosecution sanction required under the Arms Act, 1959. No Test Identification Parade had been conducted. Material witnesses had not been examined. The trial court had refused the prosecution's Section 311 CrPC application to bring in seven injured CRPF personnel as eyewitnesses, and the State's grievance about that refusal could not, by itself, salvage the case.

The Section 378 standard, applied

The bench took some care to set out the law on appeals against acquittal. It cited the Supreme Court in C. Antony v. Raghavan Nair, Ramanand Yadav v. Prabhunath Jha, Tota Singh v. State of Punjab, State of Rajasthan v. Kistoora Ram and Jafarudheen v. State of Kerala for a single proposition: an appellate court interferes with an acquittal only when the trial court's view is impossible or perverse, not when a different view is merely preferable. Where two views are possible on the evidence, the acquittal stands. The presumption of innocence, the bench observed, is strengthened — not weakened — by an acquittal.

Applying that standard, the bench held that the prosecution case rested wholly on circumstantial evidence and that the chain failed the tests laid down by the Supreme Court in Sharad Birdhichand Sarda v. State of Maharashtra. The circumstances established did not exclude every hypothesis other than the guilt of the accused. Reasonable doubt remained.

The order of acquittal cannot be termed as perverse, unreasonable, or one that defies logic.

The bench was equally clear on what its conclusion did not mean. The loss of 76 lives was a matter of profound tragedy and national concern. But the criminal justice system, however anguished by the gravity of the offence, must adhere to the rule of law and the evidentiary standards mandated by it. To convict in the absence of cogent and legally admissible evidence would offend the fundamental principles of criminal law, including the presumption of innocence.

Outcome

ACQA No. 85 of 2014 stands dismissed. The acquittal of the respondents is upheld. The bench has directed the Registry to send certified copies of the order to the Chief Secretary to the Government of Chhattisgarh and to the Director General of Police, Chhattisgarh, with directions that the State must ensure higher standards of investigation in future cases of mass casualty or threats to national security — prompt forensic and ballistic collection, proper chain of custody, early identification and examination of material witnesses, Test Identification Parades where applicable, prosecution sanctions where the law requires them, and internal review mechanisms to monitor investigative quality. The State has also been directed to put training programmes in place and to report periodically on compliance.