The following is an excerpt from the speech given by Dhananjaya Y Chandrachud, Chief Justice of India, at the India Today Conclave 2023 session titled “Justice in the Balance.”
There are various kinds of pressure. Let me clarify: Having served for over 23 years by the end of April 2024, I’m the longest-serving judge in the Indian judiciary. In 23 years, I served as the Chief Justice of the High Court and as a judge of the Supreme Court, and in this over two-decade-long career, I hope you will trust me when I say this: no one has told me to decide a case in a particular way, absolutely, no one. We are so clear in the principles that we follow. I wouldn’t even talk to my colleague presiding over a case and ask them what’s going on in that particular case. We have a cup of coffee every morning, but that’s it.
There are some lines which we draw for ourselves. In the high courts, we hear appeals against colleagues’ decisions because the decision of a single judge in a high court goes to a division bench of two judges. We eat lunch together. And I’m hearing an appeal against that colleague’s judgment, but we never share that I’m sitting in judgment over that judge’s decision. That’s part of our training. So, there’s no question if by pressure you meant a sense of pressure from the executive or from the political arm of government. Absolutely no. And I hope I’m also speaking for the rest of the system.
But when you talk of pressure in the sense of pressure on the conscience, pressure on your mind, or on your intellect, yes, of course, I’ll be a hypocrite if I say that, you know, we are driven by a sense of searching for the truth, the correct findings.
Particularly in the Supreme Court, cases don’t require one particular solution and are not as simple as one plus one is equal to two. More than one solution can emerge in a case. And what you decide today has wider ramifications for society in the future.
So, much of the work we do in the court is based on how we envision our society in the future. And when you decide something as crucial as the path our society should take for the future, the judges will be introspective and reflective. I don’t think I would call that pressure, but just the search for the truth and the correct solution.
The Election Commission judgment is one judgment. I can give you judgment after judgment that we deliver in a routine manner. They don’t make headlines as they are not big-ticket judgments. The largest litigant in India today is the State, and most of our judgments deal with the involvement of the State and its instrumentalities.
And we are holding against the state; I’m not just saying government, but against the state, in many issues, whether it’s crime, pensions, somebody’s employment or insurance policy, etc. And I don’t think that even the government in that sense, and let me be very candid about it. There is a certain robust nature of our own democracy that we must have trust in. We are now living in an age where, because of social media, we have become increasingly distrustful of public institutions. We also have to understand that over the last 70 years, our democracy has developed a very clear and defining line of separation between the Executive, the Legislative and the Judiciary. And I do believe that there is absolutely no issue.
We are constantly holding governments to account and courts speaking truth to power, and I don’t think the governments are also concerned so long as they know their field of demarcation and we know ours. We know which line separates policy from law and politics from law. In some cases, the line is not as easy to define as it would appear in a textbook. But we have to do that exercise, how tricky it is.
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