Aditi Saraf

Just one more thing: The procedural history of these bail pleas in Delhi’s constitutional courts should itself stand as a case study in how executive pressure meets judicial timidity, and how liberty dies by adjournment. Two successive Chief Justices of the Delhi High Court, Justice Satish Chandra Sharma and Justice Manmohan, remained silent while administrative delays crippled the bail hearings in a case watched across the world—one that demanded justice not merely to be done but seen to be done. Both now serve as Supreme Court justices. Four High Court judges sat on completed hearings for months, without passing a verdict, defying the Supreme Court’s own mandate prescribing expeditious pronouncement of judgments in fully heard cases. Two of them were promoted as Chief Justices of two High Courts. Two Chief Justices of India, D.Y. Chandrachud and B.R. Gavai, who postured as champions of liberty, avoided hearing the matter themselves despite unmistakable signs of executive pressure at the court below. Instead, both invoked their roster powers, sometimes disregarding the court’s own rules and conventions, to assign these urgent bail pleas to junior judges whose known inclinations in such matters raised credible apprehensions of bias. When future historians document how institutions bent in this era, these cases and judges will be among the prominent exhibits.