Adeeba Khan
On August 13, the Bar Council of India did something no statutory regulator overseeing the legal profession had done before. It told every state bar council in the country not to enrol an entire graduating batch of law students, not because of any academic default, but because that batch had objected to who was coming to hand them their degrees. Within hours, under the weight of nationwide outrage, the BCI reversed itself. Within a day, the Chief Justice of India was in open court asking who had given the Bar Council the authority to do what it had just done. What he did not mention was that the students’ objection to him personally had a precedent: weeks earlier, faced with a lawyer seeking urgent relief for protesters injured by the police, the same Chief Justice had said not to waste the court’s time.
These are not isolated news cycles. They are chapters in the same story: a sitting Chief Justice whose off-the-cuff remarks and courtroom choices keep colliding with the lived reality of the citizens those remarks were about, and a judiciary that seems increasingly uncertain about where its authority ends and where the rights of ordinary people begin.
The convocation that never needed to become a crisis
The trouble began, as these things often do, with a straightforward request. A section of NALSAR University of Law’s 2026 graduating batch wrote to their administration asking it to reconsider its choice of Chief Justice Surya Kant as chief guest for their convocation. Their objection was not personal. It was tied to proceedings before a bench headed by Justice Surya Kant concerning alleged police excesses against protesters during a demonstration at Jantar Mantar on July 20. The students did not think it was appropriate to receive their degrees from a dignitary whose conduct on the bench, in their reading, had appeared dismissive of serious allegations of police brutality against young, unarmed citizens.
That is, by any reasonable standard, the kind of dissent a law school should be able to absorb. Instead, the Bar Council of India chose escalation. Its first circular alleged that groupism and dirty politics among NALSAR’s faculty had misled and instigated students, and it ordered every state bar council to withhold enrolment from the entire 2026 batch until further notice. It did not matter, apparently, that a formal decision was not due until August 19, or that the accused had not been heard. The punishment arrived before the enquiry did.
The backlash was immediate and came from lawyers, academics and members of the public who saw the circular for what it was: a regulatory body punishing students for exercising a plainly constitutional right to protest. The BCI withdrew the order within hours, conceding that the vast majority of the batch had played no role in any disturbance. The next day, the matter reached the Supreme Court itself, where a bench led by CJI Kant told the Bar Council in no uncertain terms that it had no business interfering in what he called a dialogue between him and the students, and that the students had every right to protest, wrong or not.
It is a fair and, on its face, a liberal position for a Chief Justice to take. But it also raises an uncomfortable question: if the CJI accepts, without hesitation, that these students had a right to voice their objection to him personally, why has the same court shown so little patience for citizens raising a version of the same objection through the ordinary channels of litigation?
From a courtroom aside to a movement
To understand why NALSAR’s students felt strongly enough to write that letter, it helps to go back to May, when Justice Surya Kant, hearing a matter concerning fraudulent professional credentials, remarked that there are youngsters like cockroaches, who do not get employment and have no place in the profession, and who then turn to media, social media and activism to attack everyone. The CJI has since said the remark was directed only at holders of fake law degrees and that his words were taken out of context. That clarification, however, arrived only after the damage was done. The phrase escaped the courtroom entirely and gave birth to the Cockroach Janta Party, a satirical youth movement that channelled real anger over unemployment into a month of protest, including a hunger strike at Jantar Mantar led in part by the activist Sonam Wangchuk.
That protest culminated in a march on July 20 that drew roughly seventy-five thousand people. What followed was a security crackdown marked by allegations of pellet guns, nail-studded batons and mass injuries, allegations the police have denied but which independent courts have not dismissed as frivolous. When the matter was mentioned before the Supreme Court on July 22, with a lawyer offering video evidence of police excess, the CJI declined to entertain it, telling the lawyer not to waste the court’s time. Around the same time, the Delhi High Court took a markedly different view of essentially the same facts. A division bench led by Chief Justice D.K. Upadhyaya issued notices to the Centre and the Delhi Police, ordered the preservation of all CCTV footage and records from the protest, and explicitly rejected the state’s argument that this was an isolated law-and-order incident rather than a matter warranting constitutional scrutiny.
That contrast matters. It shows that the reluctance to engage with allegations of police brutality was not compelled by the facts of the case. It was a choice, made at the very top of the judicial hierarchy, while a high court one rung below was prepared to treat the same allegations as serious enough to demand answers.
The separation of powers problem nobody wants to name
Underneath all of this sits a structural anxiety that predates Justice Surya Kant and will outlast his tenure: the slow erosion of the line between the judiciary and the executive it is meant to check. India’s constitutional design rests on the assumption that judges decide cases without one eye on what comes after retirement. That assumption has been tested repeatedly. A former Chief Justice was nominated to the Rajya Sabha within months of demitting office. Former Chief Justices and former Election Commissioners have gone on to accept governorships and other political appointments, almost always from the government of the day, and almost always after their courts or commissions delivered outcomes that government found convenient. None of this proves that any individual verdict was compromised. But a doctrine of separation of powers cannot survive on the promise that judges are personally incorruptible while the institutional pipeline between the bench and political office stays wide open. Perception is not a minor casualty in that arrangement; it is the whole point of the doctrine, which exists precisely so that citizens do not have to take institutional independence on faith.
Set against that backdrop, the NALSAR episode reads differently. A CJI who is quick to defend his own standing before a regulator, and equally quick to wave away a citizen’s plea for accountability over police violence, is not behaving inconsistently by accident. He is exercising the same discretion in two directions at once, generously toward the institution he heads and its authority over him personally, sparingly toward citizens seeking the institution’s protection from the state. That asymmetry, repeated often enough, is what erodes public confidence in courts far more than any single controversial remark ever could.
A pattern, not a headline
None of this makes CJI Surya Kant unique among his predecessors, several of whom navigated their own controversies, from allegations of executive proximity to questions about judicial overreach. What makes this moment worth pausing on is the density of incidents packed into a single tenure: a remark about unemployed youth that spiralled into a national movement, a courtroom refusal to look at evidence of police violence against the very protesters that remark helped mobilise, and a regulator’s overreach that the CJI himself had to slap down, days after his own bench had shown far less urgency for the students’ underlying grievance.
Institutions earn credibility slowly and lose it quickly. The Bar Council’s climbdown and the Supreme Court’s intervention on behalf of NALSAR’s students were, in isolation, the right outcomes. But an institution cannot only be responsive when the controversy involves its own standing. If the same urgency, the same willingness to say who are they to interfere, were extended to citizens alleging that the state used nail-studded batons on unarmed protesters, this would not be a story about a credibility crisis. It would simply be a story about a court doing its job.
Adeeba Khan is a fourth-year law student at HILSR, Jamia Hamdard, New Delhi
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the policy of the platform.
