Office hours
Dear Chief Justice Surya Kant: I commend you for your discovery this week that time is finite.
On Wednesday, when a petitioner confronted you with video evidence of police brutality on July 20 against the students protesting peacefully in and around Jantar Mantar over exam paper leaks and a dire lack of good jobs in the country, you said, “Don’t waste our time, and don’t waste your time.” When the lawyer pressed his case, you were blunt: “We are not interested in videos. We don’t have time to watch them.”
I understand: judges are busy people and the Supreme Court cannot afford to investigate every clip that goes viral. However, within 48 hours, you found ample time to consider a matter involving rather more immediate stakes: the city government’s decision to temporarily close the Supreme Court metro station, which mildly inconvenienced litigants and lawyers, and by extension the court. “If no solution comes up by lunchtime, we will intervene otherwise,” you had said.
There is a species of irony here that writes itself. People are organising and documenting the very protests inconveniencing Delhi’s commuters on platforms like Instagram and Snapchat, which subsist on videos by and for the Gen-Z crowd that you apparently had no time for.
Incidentally, those same pieces of footage happen to be the only instruments currently capable of holding the Delhi police and the CRPF accountable to any meaningful degree: just watch how quickly the posture of a uniformed fellow changes to anger and irritation the moment a phone’s camera turns his way. Yet your court said it had no time for video evidence.
You might recall we got here thanks to your “cockroach” remark about unemployed youth, the same individuals who have given these admirable protests their name and momentum. Of course, you later said the press had misquoted your comment, that you had directed it at people with ‘fake’ degrees, and that even so you had issued it with the “greatest concern and respect” for the country’s youth. Did that concern come with office hours?
An important purpose of public protests is to inconvenience, to force the comfortable publics and an even more comfortable state to notice a problem serious enough for a few people to be willing to disrupt their own lives over it. I am glad you grasped this instinctively the moment the train schedule was affected. You have also since admitted two petitions on police brutality and listed them for hearing next week. But I wish you had recognised it when the students had been lathi-charged and hit with pellets.
On that day, it said something about whose time was actually being wasted, and by whom.
