The apex court rings its own chain

In 1605, on his accession, the Mughal Emperor Jahangir fastened a chain outside his palace. Any subject denied justice by his administration could pull the chain and reach the emperor directly. The chain was, in conception, a remedy against the bureaucracy. The Indian Supreme Court is now, in its suo motu cognisance of individual criminal cases, the bureaucracy itself, ringing its own version of the chain. Each televised listing is the sound of the apex court calling attention to itself.

Media and motive

The latest instance is the court’s suo motu cognisance of Twisha Sharma’s death, registered under the title ‘In Re Alleged Institutional Bias and Procedural Discrepancies in the Unnatural Death of a Young Girl at Her Matrimonial Home’. The title prejudges its own inquiry. Institutional bias has not been judicially established at any level. The apex court’s own office report, signed by the Assistant Registrar on May 23, records the basis of registration. The case was registered, the document says, ‘based on media reports and other attending circumstances’. Two days later, the same bench appealed to the media to refrain from recording statements of witnesses. A court that acts on press reports while admonishing the journalists who filed them is, at the same moment, both consumer and critic of the same source. 

The ground on which the apex court arrived was not vacant. A magistrate in Bhopal had remanded the husband, a practising advocate, to seven days of police custody. The Madhya Pradesh High Court had directed a second autopsy by an AIIMS Delhi team. The Bar Council of India had suspended the husband’s licence. The State government had proposed transferring the investigation to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) before the apex listing. The institutions whose bias the apex title alleges had been moving against the accused for nearly a fortnight.

Marc Galanter and Vasujith Ram put the central question to this reflex with care. Their study appears in A Qualified Hope (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Why does the response of the higher judiciary to executive or police failure take ‘the form of these singular heroic interventions rather than promoting some institutional shake-up, some initiative to empower and equip courts lower in the judicial hierarchy’? Their diagnosis was unsparing. The reflex carries, they wrote, ‘an echo of the disdain with which higher courts in India frequently treat the efforts of the lower judiciary’.

Easier path

Suo motu cognisance, in matters of this kind, is the easier of the two paths open to the apex court. The harder path is the slow, unspectacular work of reforming the judiciary it heads. The first requires only the bench’s decision to list the matter. The second requires sustained cooperation: with the High Courts on case management and supervision under Article 235 (control over subordinate courts), with State governments on funding trial-court infrastructure, with the executive on judicial appointments, and with the National Judicial Academy on training. The asymmetry between the energies devoted to the two paths is what produces the diagnosis Galanter and Ram named.

Where the easier path is taken, the court chooses persuasion over compulsion. The apex bench has, in Sahara India Real Estate Corporation v. SEBI (2012), a five-judge Constitution Bench authority on media trial. Sahara permits a court to issue a postponement order against media publication. The test is a real and substantial risk of prejudice to the administration of justice. The order is available only where no less restrictive means will work. The doctrine is settled. In the Twisha matter, the bench had every occasion to invoke it. It chose instead to request the media not to record statements of potential witnesses. A request from the apex court carries moral weight. But it is not the legal instrument it has at hand for this very problem.

The post-2019 record is unkind to the pro-suo-motu case. In the R.G. Kar matter, the Supreme Court registered cognisance on August 18, 2024. Sanjay Roy had been arrested by the Kolkata Police eight days earlier. The Calcutta High Court had handed the probe to the CBI on August 13, 2024. The Sealdah trial court convicted Roy in January 2025 and sentenced him to life imprisonment. The trial judge did the work. Apex monitoring of CBI status reports did not.

Hathras is closer to the Bhopal facts and more instructive. The Lucknow bench of the Allahabad High Court registered the case suo motu in October 2020. The Supreme Court, after entertaining transfer petitions, handed monitoring back to the High Court within weeks. That earlier bench saw the architectural point: the High Court was already in motion, and the apex role was supervisory. In July 2024, following the Hathras Satsang stampede that claimed 121 lives, the court declined a PIL. The bench said that the High Court was equipped to deal with the case. The same principle applies in Bhopal too.

Scarce attention

Lakhimpur Kheri sharpens the matter. The apex court took cognisance in October 2021 and, in April 2022, set aside the High Court’s bail order for the main accused, Ashish Mishra. It then eased him back into liberty. Interim bail came in 2023. Regular bail followed in 2024. As of early 2026, the trial court had examined only 44 of 131 witnesses. In Manipur, the suo motu case over the viral video from July 2023 has yet to produce a conviction. Apex supervision has not been the route to faster justice.

A second observation runs alongside. In 2019, Galanter and Ram called suo motu ‘rare but highly visible’. The first half of that description has lapsed. What was once a residual jurisdiction is now a recurring instrument. A trigger sequence has begun to repeat. Sustained primetime attention is followed by cognisance. The Solicitor General has now confirmed the sequence in open court. Appearing for the Union in the Twisha matter, he told the bench that ‘it is also because of this media intervention that a lot of progress has happened’.

The numbers since the chapter, authored by Galanter and Ram, went to press confirm the rule. The Supreme Court Observer, working from the apex court’s own Case Status records, counts 35 suo motu matters in the five years from 2020 to 2024. The preceding fifteen years had seen only 31 in total. The annual figures, excluding contempt, were 10 in 2020, eight in 2021, one in 2022, four in 2023, and 12 in 2024. The trend continues. In 2025, the court’s numbering reached 10 civil suo motu writs and three criminal matters. Nine of the 10 civil matters are publicly listed. By May 25 this year, the count already stood at four civil and four criminal matters. Both totals exclude suo motu transfer and contempt, which exercise distinct constitutional powers. The criminal count, in particular, has risen sharply. Four months and three weeks have already exceeded the criminal count for all of 2025.

Judicial attention is a scarce resource. The National Crime Records Bureau recorded 6,450 dowry deaths in 2022, with convictions in only 11 to 17 per cent of cases. The court has the capacity to list one. The criterion of selection is, on the present record, temporal rather than legal. Galanter and Ram closed their chapter with a question. They asked whether suo motu was ‘an instance of effective use of the scarce resource of judicial attention’. The seven years since they wrote have not produced an easier answer.

None of this is to deny the seriousness of the Twisha Sharma matter. The accused’s mother is a retired judge. The husband is a lawyer. The family of the deceased has reason to fear local proximity. The constitutional response to that fear is independent investigation under judicial supervision, conducted promptly. The court, however, disposed of the matter on the first day after taking note of the “narrative” in the media that a fair investigation was being denied on account of the involvement of the judiciary.

The chain Jahangir hung was a remedy against an unaccountable bureaucracy. The apex court is now that bureaucracy. Each televised listing is the sound it makes to draw attention to a failure it has the power, and the constitutional duty, to repair. Until the harder of its two paths is walked with the energy now devoted to the easier one, the chain will keep ringing. The trial courts below it will keep doing the work.

(V. Venkatesan is a journalist and legal researcher.)