बेबाक · Editorial
When Courts Carry the Republic: Accountability the Executive Should Have Delivered
From DNA testing for the war dead to a fine on a state for harassing its own official, the judiciary is doing work the administration left undone.
A busy record
Read together, recent court reporting is a portrait of the judiciary doing the republic's heavy lifting. The Supreme Court asked the Centre to facilitate DNA testing and legal aid for the families of Indians killed in the Russia-Ukraine war. It directed the Centre and the states to develop a compensation mechanism for accidents caused by stray animals. It ordered the Rajasthan government to pay Rs 1 lakh to a government official for harassment caused by political interference in a prosecution sanction. Meanwhile, a Delhi court handed life terms to former AAP councillor Tahir Hussain and four others for the 2020 riots murder of Intelligence Bureau staffer Ankit Sharma, and the Delhi High Court sought Delhi Police's response on Umar Khalid's fresh bail plea in the UAPA case linked to the alleged larger conspiracy behind the 2020 northeast Delhi riots. Different courts, one thread: institutions answering to law.
The core tension
The same record exposes the strain. When courts must order a ministry to facilitate identification of mortal remains, or fine a state for harassing its own servant, the judiciary is compensating for executive failure, not merely adjudicating disputes. There is a cost. A court that governs by continuing direction — a mechanism for compensation here, a protocol for livestream archives there — is doing work the administration and legislature should have done first. The bench becomes the default problem-solver of last resort, which is at once a tribute to its credibility and a warning about the atrophy of everything around it. Accountability that arrives only after litigation is justice delayed by design.
Steel-manning both sides
One view holds this is overreach: unelected judges should not design compensation mechanisms or discipline elected governments, and the separation of powers erodes each time a bench issues a slew of directions to the Centre and the states. The competing view is sturdier. When an official is harassed because of political interference in a prosecution sanction, when grieving families need the court's push to identify mortal remains and seek compensation, or when, as the High Court of Meghalaya noted with serious concern, non-state actors are alleged to have assaulted an advocate accused of molesting a law intern, the ordinary machinery has already failed. Intervention then is not a usurpation of democracy but a rescue of it. The remedy for judicial overreach is executive competence, not judicial silence.
What the record shows
The specifics resist easy rhetoric. The apex court's Rs 1 lakh penalty on the Rajasthan government for political interference in a prosecution sanction is a priced rebuke to the culture of pressuring officials. In Gandhinagar, a Rs 5 lakh cheque-dishonour case ended with one year's imprisonment and Rs 5 lakh compensation — the everyday grind of law. The Delhi court's life sentence for Tahir Hussain and four others, convicted for Ankit Sharma's murder, affirms that the law's full weight follows such a crime. And the July 24 interim order barring circulation of livestream proceedings on digital platforms, even as the Supreme Court moots a protocol to access its livestream archives, shows a court wrestling openly with transparency against commercial exploitation and misuse.
The transparency question
That livestream tension deserves an honest hearing. The Supreme Court's anxiety is real: fragments of hearings, circulated commercially or misused, can distort proceedings into spectacle. Yet activists warn that the July 24 bar risks reversing the principle of open justice, especially when courts are routinely adjudicating the limits of executive power. Sunlight remains the best disinfectant. The answer is neither full, unregulated circulation nor an opaque blanket bar, but disciplined transparency — authenticated archives, published access rules, non-commercial safeguards and penalties for manipulation. Open justice cannot swing between total livestreaming and a sudden interim reversal without a stable rule; citizens are owed predictability, and the right to watch justice being done.
The way forward
The constructive path is to make courts the backstop, not the frontline. The Centre should convert the identification and compensation mechanisms the bench has ordered — for the war dead, for stray-animal accident victims — into standing processes, so no future family needs a petition to claim a right. States must insulate prosecution sanctions from political interference through statutory timelines, sparing officials the harassment the apex court just penalised. Police responses in serious bail matters under exceptional laws should be time-bound, and trials in such cases given scheduling priority, so liberty is not lost to delay. And the judiciary should finalise a clear, published livestream-archive protocol. A republic is strong when its administration acts before its courts must.
A court that fines a state for harassing its own official is defending every citizen ever crushed by a hostile file.
Your Constitutional Rights
What the Constitution guarantees in this storyThe State shall take steps to separate the judiciary from the executive in the public services.
Directive PrincipleThe right to move the Supreme Court directly to enforce fundamental rights — called by Dr Ambedkar "the heart and soul of the Constitution." The courts can issue writs such as habeas corpus and mandamus.
Fundamental RightNo person shall be deprived of life or personal liberty except by a fair, just and reasonable procedure established by law — read by the courts to include dignity, privacy, health, a clean environment and livelihood.
Fundamental RightThe State shall not deny any person equality before the law or the equal protection of the laws. Like must be treated alike; the law cannot be arbitrary.
Fundamental RightWhat this editorial rests on
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An editorial is the considered opinion of The Mudda desk, argued from the sourced reporting above and written under our published persona, बेबाक. We name institutions and actors; we do not endorse or attack any political party. "The Mudda's Ask" is a citizen's good-faith policy proposal, grounded in the Constitution — not the platform of any party. Translations are faithful — no fact is added in any language. If we are wrong, we will say so. How we work →