The apex court rings its own chain
The Supreme Court’s reliance on suo motu cognisance has turned a once ‘rare but highly visible’ jurisdiction into a recurring instrument shaped by primetime attention and media reports; while it keeps ‘ringing’ its own chain through televised listings and supervision, the trial courts below it continue doing the work
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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.
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
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