It was indeed a wise man who said judges should shun the spotlight and let their judgments do the talking. But that was before the era of the sound bite, YouTube and 24x7 breaking news. And, of course, post-retirement re-employment, or the need to demonstrate loyalty.

In India's legal firmament today, judgments no longer make news, mainly, I suspect, because they have become one-sided and therefore predictable. It is the obiter dicta that make news nowadays, delivered from the lofty perch of finality, if not infallibility.

Chief Justice of India Surya Kant is currently not only the master of the roster, he is also the master of the obiter dicta. How can we forget, if not treasure, his denunciation of the three distinguished academicians who wrote the chapter on the judiciary for an NCERT textbook, and his decision to bar them from any government engagement? The later "cockroach" comment is now part of legal folklore. And just last month, in an address at Oxford University, he remarked that India should develop its own "swadeshi jurisprudence", something even our freedom fighters had not thought of.

I am not sure what the CJI meant by this call for legal atmanirbharta, or whether this self-inflicted ghetto-isation is the right course to follow. For, in civilised democracies at least, jurisprudence and laws are aligned with global principles, concepts, conventions, declarations, rights and charters, and until recently we more or less conformed to these universal principles. Over the last decade or so, however, we have started ploughing our own legal furrow, and the remark of the CJI has only served to draw attention to this unhealthy development.

For, it must be lamented, swadeshi jurisprudence has unfortunately already arrived in India, which is why, according to the World Justice Project's Rule of Law Index 2025, we rank 86th out of 143 countries, firmly in the bottom........

© National Herald