Rahul Bhatia

Two nights ago I attended the launch of [In]Complete Justice?, S Muralidhar’s book of essays about the state of India’s Supreme Court, which turns 75 this year. The hall at India International Centre brimmed with senior advocates, journalists, and politicians soon after six that evening. By the time the event began—a conversation between J. Murali, J. Abhay Oka, and professor Gopal Guru—the room’s sides and back were lined with junior advocates who had sacrificed their seats for their senior.

I was curious. I had first read about Muralidhar on the morning of 26 February 2020, in a story describing his urgent constitution of a bench at midnight during three days of communal violence in north-east Delhi stoked by BJP leaders. He ordered the police to and ensure that victims of the violence were allowed safe passage to medical treatment. Later that morning, he questioned the Delhi police’s inordinate delay in registering first information reports against three BJP leaders for hate speech.

I remember that day because reading his orders, his instructions, his observations about the police, about the conduct of the police and lawmakers—and understanding everything that it implied—filled me with unusual hope. Here was a time in which people of every rank and stripe defaulted to cowardice they called caution, as if what went on in the country had nothing to do with them (the ignorance of people who understand tyranny as a shadow to step around, not as a bottomless well of dark ink that blots and blots and blots, blotting memories and laws and history and science and moral clarity). Here was a time when calling a thing by its name was met with the state’s punitive energies.

And in this dark time was a judge, finally, finally, whose notions of right and wrong, of the obvious lines crossed, felt like my own. You have to sense people like these in authoritarian places for they tend to be quiet, they tend to keep doing their thing in isolation, in a haze of oppressive loneliness, utterly at the mercy of a bureaucracy unlike any of the past, for its utter stupidity has no comparison in living memory. These people, many of whom I met while writing my book, and who I still meet, are dissimilar in many ways, but they tend to possess an underlying moral system, a collection of ideas and experiences that keep them going, and a kind of manic personality that swings between extreme hope and despair, with the occasional pause at mad laughter. They keep their head down (researchers), they entrust their fate to people who can bring about the end of long careers—but they push, and push, to understand and inspire others to look harder.

Muralidhar was in the light, and on the night of the 26th, the order for his transfer from the Delhi High Court to the Punjab and Haryana High Court came in. The authorities said it was routine. Retired justices would later say that he was punished. But there is a world outside authority’s clarifications and the judgements of judges, and its verdict, largely, was rotting fish. Muralidhar departed a week later, and the halls of the Delhi High Court were filled with people who knew. (Just look at this picture. Also, this farewell video. Who gets farewells like these?)

The book launch was more than an event. It was a gathering to understand the court’s ways and dysfunctions. The panelists spoke for forty minutes. There was laughter, there was remembering, there was acknowledging the obvious. And then, when it was finally over and opened to the audience for questions, it truly sprang to life. What life: for twenty frenetic minutes, in which the moderator, Manisha Pande, was bewildered by the persistence of the judges’ interrogators, I was reminded of how much communication flows one way in this country, and of how refreshing it is to hear real dialogue—angry, questioning, doubtful, skeptical dialogue—on the rare occasion that the generally silent are handed the mic.

Indira Jaising began; ballistic missiles disguised as questions at a distance of five meters. Why, she asked, did the collegium elevate a high court judge from Gujarat to the Supreme Court despite a justice’s objections? What were the justice’s exact objections? Where was the transparency in such matters?

[Nervous laughter, clenched bums. This crowd—which gives up its seats to senior advocates and almost bows in the presence of these judges—was unsure of how to respond, at first. (I was cackling, and more awake than I’d been in weeks.)]

There was some attempt at a response. The gist of it was that transparency was necessary. Weak. The book’s editor stood to one side with a big smile.

Then a (former, I think) BBC correspondent rose with a long preamble about women’s safety and a story about a passenger who [“is there a question here,” Pande asked] requested a different seat because she offered namaaz on the flight. How would the judges ensure women’s safety and [we’re here to talk about the book, Pande said, as the mic was retrieved]…

Perhaps not the place, nor the time, but beside the stage, a woman wearing a headscarf covered her mouth and nodded yes! I took it to mean, you said it. You actually told them what happens.

Then someone else, aggrieved and despairing and fed up, rose and demanded to know why Justice Oka had ruled a case from 35 years ago a certain way, and why the facts in the decision were a departure from the facts as he understood them. The justice said he would not explain himself, which earned him enthusiastic applause, but the man’s fury would not be abated. The mic was taken from him too, but it was some time before he settled down.

That night I thought about discontent, about how rarely Indians find opportunity to question power, and how much dissatisfaction we do not see. Given an opening, it pours out, this unwillingness to forget or forgive a slight, an impropriety, a procedural violation. We are surrounded by media, but not the assurance that our discontent will be tolerated, and so we rarely hear it. Here, the moderator, whose work was to control the flow of the conversation, saw chaos. But stop, and really listen, and you’ll see what I saw, that the chaos and the discussion were about the same things: a deep desperation for accountability. There’s a recording somewhere, and I urge you to listen to Muralidhar, and then skip forward to the questions.

Here’s what you won’t see. After it was done, the woman in the headscarf walked up to the BBC correspondent and introduced herself. I left the room later, and might have caught a glimpse of them then. They were deep in conversation.

We’re dying to find our tribe.