Salwa Judum (meaning "Peace March" or "Purification Hunt" in Gondi language) refers to a militia in Chhattisgarh, India, which is aimed at countering the naxalite violence in the region. The militia consisting of local tribal youth receives support and training from the Chhattisgarh state government. On July 5, 2011, the Supreme Court of India declared the militia as illegal and unconstitutional. The court directed the Chhattisgarh government to recover all the firearms given along with the ammunition and accessories. It also ordered the government to investigate all instances of alleged criminal activities of Salwa Judum. The use of Salwa Judum by the government for anti naxal operations was criticized for its violations of human rights, use of child soldiers and poorly trained uneducated youth for counter-insurgency roles.

Salwa Judum started in 2006 as a people's resistance movement against the Naxalites, a far-left movement in some states in rural India that is designated by India as a terrorist organization on account of their violent Maoist activities in the state. Initially an uprising of local indigenous people in Chhattisgarh, the Salwa Judum movement later received bi-partisan support from both the opposition and ruling parties. A few years later the state government adopted the Salwa Judum movement in order to restore democratic rule to the regions where the Naxalites had established themselves by force. Chhattisgarh state has over the years trained a number of SPOs or 'Special Police Officers' (also popularly referred as Koya commandos), from amongst the tribals, who are part of Salwa Judum in the state, also with its formation the state witnessed a marked rise in success against Naxalite action, as a result in 2008, Chhattisgarh along with neighboring Jharkhand accounted for over 65% of the total Naxal violence in the country.

Mahendra Karma is a politician from Chhattisgarh, India. He was the leader of the opposition in the Chhattisgarh Vidhan Sabha from 2003 to 2008 and belongs to the Congress party. In 2005, he organised the Salwa Judum movement against Naxalites (Maoists) in Chattisgarh. The initiative was praised by the Chief Minister Raman Singh, but has been criticized as a "Vigilante militia" by pro-Naxalite groups. He was a minister in the Ajit Jogi cabinet.

Karma, an ethnic adivasi, formed the Salwa Judum, a supposedly anti-Naxalite movement led by local elites. Despite being an opposition party member, Karma aggressively lobbied in order to get bipartisan support for the Salwa Judum, and largely succeeded in 2005, when Salwa Judum was adopted by the state government and recruited as a corp of "Special Police Officers". They were given broad latitude in their actions. After the Supreme Court expressed disapproval of the Salwa Judum movement in 2008 and asked the state of Chhattisgarh to implement remedial measures mentioned in the National Human Rights Commission report which had detailed widespread human rights abuses committed by the Salwa Judum, the movement slowly started to disappear from the Chhattisgarh state.

In the Woods is a 2007 mystery novel by Tana French about a pair of Irish detectives and their investigation of the murder of a twelve year old girl. The novel won several awards such as the 2008 Edgar Award for Best First Novel By An American Author, the 2008 Barry Award for Best First Novel, the 2008 Macavity Award for Best First Mystery Novel, and the 2008 Anthony Award for Best First Novel.

Twenty years prior to the novel's events, twelve year-old Adam and his two best friends failed to come home after playing in the familiar woods bordering their Irish housing estate. A search is called by the families, and the police find Adam shivering, clawing the bark of a nearby tree, blood on his shoes and slash marks on his back. He is unable to tell them what happened or where his friends are. His amnesia holds to the present day, where he goes by his middle name, Rob, to avoid the attention of the media to his famous case. His friends were never found.

The plot of the novel circles around the murder of a twelve year old girl, Katy Devlin, whose case Rob and his partner Cassie Maddox are given to investigate. The body is found in the same woods where Rob’s friends disappeared, at an archeological dig site, and the coincidence is enough to make Rob nervous, though he insists to his partner that he is fine.

Raman Singh (born 15 October 1952) is an Indian politician who as of March 2012^[update] is the Chief Minister of Chhatisgarh and has been so since 7 December 2003. He is a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party.

Raman Singh was born on 15 October 1952. He comes from a farming family, his father being Vighnaharan Singh Thakur and his mother, Sudha Singh. He is a doctor of Ayurvedic Medicine and is married to Veena Singh.

Singh joined the Bharatiya Jan Sangh as a youth member and progressed to become a councilor.^{[citation needed]}

He was elected to Madhya Pradesh Legislative Assembly in 1990 and 1998. In 1999 he was elected to the Lok Sabha from the Rajnandgaon constituency in Chhattisgarh. In the government of Atal Bihari Vajpayee government, Singh became the Union Minister of State for Commerce and Industry. He was later named as President of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the new state of Chhattisgarh, and led the party to a victory in the 2003 state Assembly elections. With the other main contender for the Chief Minister's post, Dilip Singh Judeo, caught in the midst of a scam, the BJP leadership named Raman Singh as Chattisgarh's second Chief Minister, and the first person to be elected to that post.