बेबाक · Editorial
When the courtroom becomes the citizen's first resort, the executive has failed twice
From the Supreme Court to three High Courts, citizens are litigating accountability and safety their administrations failed to deliver — and the bench is being asked to carry too much.
A week in the dock
This week, the dispatches from the States read like a court cause list. The Supreme Court refused anticipatory bail to Right to Information activists in Punjab accused of obstructing road work, dismissing such activism as a 'new business.' The Bombay High Court ordered the State to protect a former judge, his wife and daughter, all in Mumbai. Before the Madras High Court, the Advocate-General assured that disqualification proceedings against four former MLAs would be carried to their logical end. The Kerala High Court dismissed an appeal by Industries Secretary A.P.M. Mohammad Hanish in the cashew import matter and directed him to appear in person on June 19. Different States, different subjects, one pattern: the courtroom has become the republic's complaint counter, the place a citizen turns to when nothing else moves.
Last resort, first stop
There is a difference between a judiciary that is the last resort and one that has become the first stop. The Constitution built courts to correct error, not to run the State. Yet when RTI activists are before the Supreme Court in a case arising from alleged obstruction of road work, when a litigant before the Madras High Court insists on a CBI probe into the circumstances that led four legislators to resign, and when a contempt plea becomes the lever to make a senior bureaucrat answer in the cashew case, the signal is unmistakable. The ordinary machinery — the engineer, the election authority, the vigilance wing, the secretary — has either failed to act or failed to inspire confidence that it will. The bench then inherits work never meant for it, and the citizen learns that nothing moves until a judge is petitioned.
Both sides, honestly
Steel-man the bench first. Courts are right to be wary of litigation as leverage; the Supreme Court's unease that some activism can shade into obstruction of public works is not illegitimate, and public work cannot be held hostage by every private grievance. Now steel-man the citizen. The Right to Information regime exists precisely because officials can conceal what the public is owed, and a transparency law is weakened if its users face criminal process for conduct that may also be presented as scrutiny. Both truths hold at once. The honest reading is neither that activists are a 'new business' nor that the State is always venal, but that India lacks a credible forum, short of a judge, where an honest grievance is heard quickly and an obstructive one is filtered out early.
What the record shows
Consider the delays the record itself discloses. Before the Madras High Court, Justice G.K. Ilanthiraiyan deferred orders on a plea to condone a delay of 839 days in filing a third-party revision against the 2022 acquittal of former Minister Geetha Jeevan in a disproportionate-assets case dating to 2002. Two decades on, a simple question of clean hands remains unresolved. In Kerala, A.P.M. Mohammad Hanish must appear in person on June 19 after the Kerala High Court found no reason to interfere in the contempt plea before the Single Bench. Meanwhile, routine governance fails elsewhere: in Odisha, experts warn that snakebite deaths rise when treatment slips past the 'golden hour' during the monsoon season, and in Telangana the Chief Minister says the Centre has reneged on its Hyderabad Metro phase-2 commitment while seeking a no-objection certificate for State-led funding. The courts are busiest precisely where the State is slowest.
The considered verdict
The verdict is not triumph for the judiciary but disquiet for the republic. A court system asked to protect a former judge and his family, examine the consequences of legislators' resignations, pursue a secretary through contempt, and adjudicate a quarrel arising from road work is being made to substitute for policing, administration and politics at once. That is unsustainable, and corrosive: when the bench is the only institution seen to function, every loss there is cast as persecution and every win as vindication, and judicial authority is quietly spent. Loading the courts with the failures of every other arm of the State does not deepen the rule of law. It thins it — case by case, adjournment by adjournment — until the one door still believed to work is itself overwhelmed.
The way forward
Repair lies not in more sermons about pendency but in fewer reasons to litigate. Three steps are feasible now. First, give the Right to Information regime real teeth — ensure timely disclosure and penalise wilful denial — so that scrutiny does not end in pre-arrest bail proceedings. Second, build independent, time-bound grievance and vigilance forums within each State, with functional and financial autonomy, so a citizen need not climb to a High Court to make an official answer. Third, fix delivery at the front line: stock anti-venom and train staff for the snakebite 'golden hour' across Odisha's districts during the monsoon, and resolve inter-governmental commitments such as Hyderabad Metro phase-2 rather than litigate or posture around them. Let the courts judge. Let the State, at last, govern.
A republic that routes every grievance to a judge has not strengthened its courts; it has confessed that everything else has stopped working.
At stake is whether Article 21 safety and liberty, Article 41 public assistance, Article 47 public welfare duties and Article 50’s separation of powers can function without courts becoming the executive’s complaint desk.
State Accountability Triage Law
Parliament should frame a Model State Accountability Triage Bill for States to adopt, creating an independent district-level grievance authority for RTI-linked public work disputes, protection requests, vigilance delays and official non-compliance before matters reach court. The authority should issue reasoned orders within fixed statutory deadlines, publish RTI-disclosable status reports, protect bona fide complainants from retaliatory process, and swiftly reject obstructive or bad-faith grievances so courts remain the last resort, not the first stop.
Your Constitutional Rights
What the Constitution guarantees in this storyNo 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 regard raising the level of nutrition and public health as among its primary duties.
Directive PrincipleThe State shall, within its capacity, secure the right to work, education and public assistance in cases of unemployment, old age, sickness and disablement.
Directive PrincipleThe State shall take steps to separate the judiciary from the executive in the public services.
Directive PrincipleWhat this editorial rests on
Drawn from our live multi-newsroom feed — read the reporting at source.
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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 →