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New Delhi: Tamil Nadu National Law University (NLU) has allegedly asked a final year student to take down a sub-stack post criticising the Supreme Court’s ban on the class eight Social Science textbook published by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) which included references to “corruption in judiciary”.

The student, Ravi A. Kumar, in a subsequent blog post, said that the university authorities cited external pressure from the legal community, and asked him to take down the post “immediately in the best interest of the university and yourself”. While Kumar in his second blog post has said that he will not take down the post, this has reignited the debate around whether the Supreme Court’s intervention in the NCERT book case, has sent out a chilling message, that the judiciary is above criticism. 

In his blog post on March 14 titled “The Supreme Court of India has No Spine”, Kumar criticised the Supreme Court’s actions in the NCERT case. Kumar wrote that the Supreme Court only has power of judicial review but has “now inserted themselves into both roles simultaneously: it is restricting speech as if it’s the Parliament and reviewing that restriction too.”

“This is just judicial power-brokering where they have turned the machinery made to protect the rights of the citizen to protect their own reputation,” he wrote.

Kumar noted in his post that the chapter on the judiciary actually praised it “more than enough and, in the spirit of honesty, briefly mentions that the judiciary also has problems.” Kumar wrote the data on judicial corruption in India is “not hard to find” and he made a “four page list of such news reports in 10 minutes”. He also wrote that the issue was created after prominent senior advocates including Kapil Sibal and Abhishek Manu Singhvi brought it up in court and questioned if education should only contain “approved knowledge”.

“The sad truth is that these doyens of the bar, as we call them in Madras, walked into the Supreme Court, with half-baked knowledge, and triggered one of the most sweeping acts of educational censorship in history,” he wrote.

On February 26, the court issued a complete ban on the NCERT class eight Social Science text book which included references to “corruption in the judiciary” and issued show-cause notices to the secretary of school education in the Union ministry of education and the NCERT director. It also directed that no........

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