The top court rings with its own chain

IIn 1605, on his accession, the Mughal emperor Jahangir fixed the chain outside his palace. Any subject denied justice by his administration could pull the chain and go straight to the emperor. The chain was conceptually an antidote to bureaucracy. In its suo motu cognizance of individual criminal cases, the Supreme Court of India is now a bureaucracy itself, ringing its own version of the chain. Every televised transcript is the sound of the Supreme Court drawing attention to itself.

Media and theme

The latest case is a suo motu cognizance of the court on the death of Twisha Sharma, registered under the title “In Re Alleged Institutional Bias and Procedural Irregularities in the Unnatural Death of a Young Girl in Her Matrimonial Home”. The title anticipates its own question. Institutional bias has not been judicially proven at any level. The basis for the registration is recorded in a report from the Supreme Court’s own office, signed by the deputy secretary on May 23. The document said the case was registered “based on media reports and other circumstances”. Two days later, the same bench appealed to the media to refrain from recording the statements of the witnesses. A court that acts on the basis of press reports and admonishes the journalists who filed them is both a consumer and a critic of the same source.

The land the high court arrived at was not vacant. A judge in Bhopal sent the husband, a practicing lawyer, to police custody for seven days. The Madhya Pradesh High Court directed the second autopsy by the AIIMS Delhi team. The Bar Council of India suspended the husband’s license. The state government has proposed handing over the probe to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) before the top. The institutions, whose bias the supreme title claims, moved against the accused for almost a fortnight.

Marc Galanter and Vasujith Ram put the central question of this reflex cautiously. Their study 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 these isolated 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, “echoes of the contempt with which higher courts in India often treat the efforts of the lower judiciary”.

An easier way

Suo motu cognizance is the easier of the two avenues open to the apex court in matters of this nature. The harder way is the slow, unostentatious work of judicial reform that costs. The first requires only a court decision to list the matter. The second requires continued cooperation: with high courts in case management and supervision under Article 235 (control over subordinate courts), with state governments in financing court infrastructure, with the executive in appointing judges, and with the National Judicial Academy in training. The asymmetry between the energies devoted to the two paths is the cause of the diagnosis named by Galanter and Ram.

Where the easier way is taken, the court chooses persuasion over coercion. The Supreme Court in Sahara India Real Estate Corporation v. SEBI (2012) has jurisdiction over a five-judge Constitution Bench for media trial. Sahara allows the court to issue an order to delay publication in the media. The test presents a real and substantial risk of prejudice to the administration of justice. An order is only available where less restrictive means will not work. The doctrine is settled. In the Twisha case, the bench had every opportunity to invoke it. Instead, it decided to ask the media not to record the statements of potential witnesses. The Supreme Court’s request carries moral weight. But it is not a legal tool available to him for this very problem.

The post-2019 record is unkind to a pro-suo-motu case. On 18 August 2024, the Supreme Court registered the cognizance in the case of RG Kar. Sanjay Roy was arrested by the Kolkata police eight days ago. The Calcutta High Court handed over the investigation to the CBI on 13 August 2024. A Sealdah court convicted Roy in January 2025 and sentenced him to life imprisonment. The judge did the job. There was no peak monitoring of CBI status reports.

Hathras is closer to Bhopal facts and more instructive. The Lucknow Bench of the Allahabad High Court registered the suo motu case in October 2020. The apex court, after dealing with the transfer requests, handed the watch back to the High Court within weeks. That earlier bench saw the architectural point: The Supreme Court was already on the move, and the top role was supervisory. In July 2024, after the Hathras Satsang stampede that claimed 121 lives, the court dismissed the PIL. The court said the high court is equipped to take up the case. The same principle applies in Bhopal as well.

Little attention

Lakhimpur Kheri sharpens the whole matter. The Supreme Court took note in October 2021 and in April 2022 set aside the High Court’s bail order for prime accused Ashish Mishra. This then released him back to freedom. Anticipatory bail came in 2023. Regular bail followed in 2024. In early 2026, the trial court heard only 44 of the 131 witnesses. In Manipur, the suo motu case regarding the July 2023 viral video is yet to be adjudicated. Top surveillance was not the path to speedier justice.

A second observation is taking place next door. In 2019, Galanter and Ram described suo motu as “rare but highly visible”. The first half of this description has expired. What was once a residual jurisdiction is now a recurring instrument. The startup sequence started repeating itself. Sustained prime-time attention is followed by recognition. The Attorney General has now confirmed the order in public. Appearing for the Union in the Twisha case, he told the bench that “there has been a lot of progress due to this media intervention as well”.

Figures from the chapter, authored by Galanter and Ram, went to press to confirm the rule. The Supreme Court Observer, working from its own records of Supreme Court case status, counts 35 suo motu matters in the five years from 2020 to 2024. The previous fifteen years totaled just 31. The annual numbers, 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 number of courts reached 10 civil suo motu and three criminal cases. Nine out of 10 civil cases are publicly reported. As of May 25 of this year, the count had already appeared in four civil and four criminal cases. Both sums exclude suo motu transfer and contempt, which exercise different constitutional powers. The number of crimes in particular increased significantly. Four months and three weeks have already exceeded the number of crimes for the entire year of 2025.

Judicial attention is a scarce resource. The National Crime Records Bureau recorded 6,450 dowry deaths in 2022, with a conviction in only 11 to 17 percent of cases. The court is entitled to state one. The selection criterion in this record is temporal rather than legal. Galanter and Ram close their chapter with a question. They questioned whether the suo motu was “an example of the effective use of a scarce resource of judicial attention.” The seven years since they were written have not yielded an easier answer.

None of this negates 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 the local proximity. The constitutional answer to this fear is an independent investigation under judicial supervision, conducted quickly. However, the court disposed of the matter on the very first day after taking cognizance of the “narrative” in the media that a fair investigation was denied due to the involvement of the judiciary.

The chain that Jahangir hung was an antidote to irresponsible bureaucracy. The Supreme Court is now the bureaucracy. Every telecast is a sound he makes to call attention to a failure he has the power and constitutional duty to correct. As long as the harder of his two paths is not followed with energy now devoted to the easier, the chain will continue to ring. The courts under him will continue to work.

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

Published – 31 May 2026 22:35 IST