The apex court rings its own chain
IWhen Mughal Emperor Jahangir ascended to the throne in 1605, he placed a chain in front of his palace. Any person denied justice by his administration could pull the chain and reach the emperor directly. As an idea, the chain was a remedy against bureaucracy. The Supreme Court of India is currently suo motu The bureaucracy itself, conscious of individual criminal cases, steals its own version of the chain. Every televised list is the sound of the apex court drawing attention to itself.
Media and cause
The last example is the court suo motu Information about Twisha Sharma’s death has been recorded under the heading ‘Institutional Bias and Procedural Inconsistencies Reasserted in the Unnatural Death of a Young Girl in her Matrimonial Home’. The title prejudges its own investigation. Institutional bias is not legally established at any level. The top court’s own office report, signed by the Deputy Registrar on May 23, records the merits of the entry. The document states that the case was registered ‘based on media reports and other relevant circumstances’. Two days later, the same delegation appealed to the media not to record the statements of the witnesses. A court that acts on the basis of media reports and admonishes journalists who present them is at the same time both a consumer and a critic of the same source.
The place where the Supreme Court came was not empty. A magistrate in Bhopal sentenced the husband, a lawyer, to seven days’ police custody. The Madhya Pradesh High Court had directed a second autopsy by the AIIMS Delhi team. The Bar Council of India had suspended the husband’s driving licence. The state government had suggested transferring the investigation to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) before the superlisting. The institutions, which are claimed to be biased in the top headline, had been acting against the defendants for almost two weeks.
Marc Galanter and Vasujith Ram have carefully posed the fundamental question regarding this reflex. Her work appears in A Qualified Hope (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Why does the higher judiciary’s response to executive or police failure take ‘the form of singular heroic interventions rather than encouraging an institutional shake-up, an attempt to strengthen and equip courts lower in the judicial hierarchy’? Their diagnoses were brutal. This reflex, they wrote, carried ‘an echo of the disdain with which the higher courts in India often show towards the efforts of the lower judiciary’.
easier way
suo motu Knowledge of such matters is the easier of the two paths to the apex court. The more difficult path is the slow and extraordinary work of reforming the judiciary. The first requires only the panel’s decision to list the issue. The latter requires constant cooperation: with the High Courts on case management and supervision under Article 235 (control over lower courts), with State governments on financing of court infrastructure, with the executive on judicial appointments, and with the National Judicial Academy on training. The asymmetry between the energies splitting into two pathways is what gives rise to the diagnosis Galanter and Ram call it.
Where the easier route is chosen, the court chooses persuasion rather than coercion. The summit delegation, Sahara India Real Estate Corporation v. In SEBI (2012), a five-judge Constitution Bench has jurisdiction over media litigation. Sahara allows the court to grant stays against media coverage. This test poses a real and serious risk of undermining the administration of justice. This order applies only when less restrictive means would not work. The doctrine is established. In the Twisha matter, the bench had every opportunity to invoke this. Instead, he chose to request the media not to record the statements of potential witnesses. A request from the Supreme Court carries moral weight. But that is not the legal tool he has for this problem.
The record after 2019 is not very pleasant for the pros.suo-motu case. In the RG Kar case, the Supreme Court recorded its judgment on August 18, 2024. Sanjay Roy was arrested by Kolkata Police eight days ago. The Calcutta High Court had handed over the investigation to the CBI on August 13, 2024. The Sealdah court convicted Roy in January 2025 and sentenced him to life imprisonment. The trial judge did the job. Apex monitoring of CBI status reports was not done.
Hathras is closer to the realities of Bhopal and more instructive. Lucknow bench of Allahabad High Court registered the case suo motu In October 2020. After considering the transfer petitions, the Supreme Court remanded the monitoring to the Supreme Court within a few weeks. The earlier bench had seen the architectural point: the Supreme Court had already acted, and the role at the top was supervisory. In July 2024, following the Hathras Satsang stampede that killed 121 people, the court rejected the PIL plea. The bench said the Supreme Court was well equipped to handle the case. The same principle applies to Bhopal.
little attention
Lakhimpur Kheri makes the point even sharper. The apex court took cognizance of the situation in October 2021 and set aside the Supreme Court’s bail order for prime accused Ashish Mishra in April 2022. He later freed him again. Interim bail came in 2023. This was followed by regular bail in 2024. As of the beginning of 2026, the trial court had heard only 44 of 131 witnesses. in Manipur, suo motu There has been no conviction yet in the case related to the July 2023 viral video. Apex audit has not been a path to faster justice.
There is also a second observation. Galanter and Ram called in 2019 suo motu ‘rare but highly visible’. The first half of this explanation is over. What was once the domain of authority has now become a recurring tool. A trigger sequence started to repeat. The initial attention is constantly followed by awareness. The attorney general has now confirmed the order in open court. Appearing on behalf of the Union on the Twisha issue, he told the podium that ‘there has also been a lot of progress made thanks to this media intervention’.
The numbers that have emerged since the episode written by Galanter and Ram confirm the rule. Supreme Court Watcher, working from the high court’s own Case Status records, counts 35 cases suo motu Issues in the five years from 2020 to 2024. There had been only 31 incidents in total in the previous fifteen years. The annual figures, excluding insults, are 10 in 2020, eight in 2021, one in 2022, four in 2023 and 12 in 2024. The trend continues. In 2025, the number of the court will reach 10 civilians suo motu articles and three criminal cases. Nine out of 10 civil matters are publicly listed. As of May 25 this year, the count was currently based on four civil and four criminal cases. Both totals exclude suo motu Transfer and contempt using different constitutional powers. In particular, there was a sharp increase in the number of crimes. Four months and three weeks have already surpassed the number of crimes for the whole of 2025.
Judicial attention is a scarce resource. The National Crime Records Bureau recorded 6,450 dowry deaths in 2022, with only 11 to 17 per cent of cases resulting in conviction. The court has the power to list. Based on available records, the selection criteria are tentative rather than legal. Galanter and Ram closed their segment with a question. They asked whether suo motu ‘It was an example of the effective use of the scarce resource of judicial attention’. The seven years since they wrote have produced no easier answers.
None of this denies the seriousness of the Twisha Sharma issue. The defendant’s mother is a retired judge. Her husband is a lawyer. The family of the deceased has reason to fear local proximity. The constitutional response to this fear is an immediate independent investigation under judicial review. However, the court decided the matter on the first day, taking into account the “narrative” in the media that a fair investigation was denied due to judicial intervention.
The chain that Cihangir hung was a solution to irresponsible bureaucracy. The apex court is now a bureaucracy. Each televised list is a voice to draw attention to a failure that it has the authority and constitutional duty to repair. The chain will continue to play until you walk the harder of the two paths, allocating your energy to the easier one. The trial courts under him will continue to do this job.
(V. Venkatesan is a journalist and legal researcher.)
It was published – 31 May 2026 22:35 IST
