Author: Avika Singh
College: Jaipur National University
Abstract
The situation from 1215 is one in which the barons who forced King John to sign Magna Carta at Runnymede sought a remedy against arbitrary royal power. The charter’s abiding promise was that no free man would be imprisoned or dispossessed “except by the lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of the land.” Clear the grievance: without control, power needed outside restraints. Eight centuries later, the growing use of this suo motu cognisance by the Indian Supreme Court is a parodical iteration of its constitutional moment. The apex court now finds itself as both aggrieved litigant and arbiter, the petitioner and the judge, striking its own gong to call itself into action.
To the point
The recent suo motu registration of a matter of allegations of custodial misadventure from a northern state – Twisha Sharma’s death, under the title ‘In Re Alleged Institutional Bias and Procedural Discrepancies in the Unnatural Death of a Young Girl at Her Matrimonial Home’, while far from exceptional, sets a type. Listed according to the registry’s self-internal note, “in view of widespread media coverage and public concern,” within days of the initial hearing, the same bench admonished journalists reporting on the proceedings. A court that gains its jurisdiction from press reports while warning the media of the repercussions of its commentary takes an awkward two-fold posture — both looking up to, and looking down at, the same source.
The ground upon which the apex court stumbled was not unoccupied. A sessions court had already refused anticipatory bail to the implicated accused. The concerned High Court had already ordered a magisterial investigation. The State Human Rights Commission had ordered notice. The institutions that had failed, per the implicit charge of the suo motu cognisance, had in fact been operating, if not perfectly, at least for a period of weeks prior to the Supreme Court’s intervention.
The pattern is repeatable. The constitutional thinker, Upendra Baxi, in writing on judicial activism decades ago articulated the central problem: why does the higher judiciary’s reaction to systemic breakdown take a mode of episodic individualised rescue, rather than structural corrective changes to the judicial machinery it oversees? The question, still, remains unaddressed.
Suo motu cognisance, in cases of this nature, marks the institutionally least difficult way. It asks nothing more than a bench’s disposition to list a matter. The alternative — the arduous, unsung toil, of structural correction of the subordinate judiciary — requires a bit of persistent activity: with the High Courts, on the matter of case-flow and supervisory jurisdiction, on the matter of infrastructure for trials with States, on the matter of judicial appointments with the executive, on the matter of training academies and continuing legal education. The gap between the efforts that go into these two routes explain much of the critique.
Where the easier route is chosen, the court often replaces its moral suasion with legal compulsion. The five-judge Constitution Bench in Sahara India Real Estate Corporation v. SEBI (2012) set out a doctrine of postponement orders to safeguard fair-trial rights before media bias. The test is rigorous: serious and substantial risk, and no less intrusive alternative. The doctrine, certainly, is settled. But in recent suo motu cognisances, benches have opted to “request” or “appeal” of media, rather than invoke the instrument of law for precisely such occasions. A call from the apex-court carries weight. But it is not the law it has on its hand.
The Record Since 2019
The empirical record does not provide much justification for the position that suo motu cognisance improves the speed of justice. In the case arising out of a medical college of the eastern states, the Supreme Court took cognisance in August 2024. The accused had been proceeded against by local police over a week previously. The High Court had already issued a transfer order to the Central Bureau of Investigation. The trial-court convicted the accused and sentenced him. The trial-judice has worked hard. Apex monitoring of status reports has not worked hard.
A rural case out of the northern-plains is more instructive. The High Court had taken cognisance suo motu in October 2020. Thus the Supreme Court, upon entertaining transfer-petitions, passed supervision obligations back to the High Court in weeks. That bench had understood the architectural principle: the High Court was already having possession of the matter and the apex role was appellate, rather than original. The same rationale stands for the vast majority of subsequent registrations.
Third matter sharpens the point. Thus, the apex court, in October 2021, took cognisance and in April 2022 annulled a High Court bail order issued in a principal accused. Then it allowed him liberty. Interim bail was issued in 2023. Regular-bail followed in 2024. Currently, at the start of 2026, the trial court examined fewer than half of the prosecution-witnesses. Apex supervision is not the way to swifter adjudication.
Use of Legal Jargon
In 2019 the legal theorists, Marc Galanter and Vasujith Ram, set out that ‘suo motu is rare but highly visible; the first half of this word-taunt has fallen. What was once a residual jurisdiction is now become an instrument of regularity. A trigger-sequence has taken over, of prolonged primetime coverage followed by cognisance. A recently made clear by the Solicitor General in open court, that the time-sequencing is this: “it is also because of the intervention of the media that a lot of work has been done.” The numbers since that pronouncement went to press makes clear of the movement. Data collated from the court’s own records of case-status count thirty-five su-motu matters in the last five years between 2020 and 2024. The previous fifteen years had seen only thirty-one from total. The annual numbers, excluding the contempt, are these: ten in 2020, eight 2021, one in 2022, four in 2023 and twelve 2024. In 2025, ten civil su-motu writs and three criminal had come in the finalisation of the year. Sixty-day period, the count of this year (late May current) has reached four civil and four criminal — from both that does not figure in the transfers nor the contempts . The criminal-hits, in particular, has jumped enormously. Four months and three weeks have surpassed the total criminal for 2025 by 2026.
The Proof
Judicial attention is a scarce resource. National crime data tallied more than six thousand dowry-deaths in a single year (recent), and convictions barely in one case out of the four or five. The Court has available the space to list one. The criteria for choice is, according to the available evidence, temporal rather than doctrinal — in the nature of the news cycle, instead of of legal principle.
Not to say that the gravity of individual cases which attract su-motu cognisance is no less. Families dealing with local power constellations may have reason to fear nearness. The constitutional remedy to the fear is independent examination with judicial control, undertaken expediently. The remedy, though, is available through normal appellate and transfer jurisdiction. The question is whether su-motu cognisance of present-day’s practice adds to the institutional capacity or only to the institutional visibility.
Conclusion
The barons at Runnymede looked for a remedy against unbridled power. The charter they won, in conception, imposed an external restraints upon the Crown. The Indian Supreme Court’s su-motu jurisdiction flips that relationship. The court is, now, namely, both an institution which is alleged to have failed — in its supervisory dominance over the lower judiciary — as well an institution that prides itself on being the cure for such a failure. Each televised listing strikes the resonation that the apex court strikes to bring attention to the dysfunction that it is equipped to repair (albeit not spectatorially) by less fanfaries.
Until that more difficult one of the two routes is travelled with the enterprise it now devotes to the more simple, the paradox will have to endure. The trial courts below will continue to get the job done. The apex court will continue to take the credit. And the question Galanter and Ram set out — whether su-motu cognisance “is an effective use of the scarce resource of judicial attention” will have to await a convincing argument.
FAQs
Q1: What issue with the constitution does the article identify with regard to current suo motu practices?
The article asks whether the increasing use of suo motu cognizance changes the role of the court such that it becomes self-initiating and self-adjudicating, resulting in a contradiction of self-surveillance of the institution.
Q2: In what way does the article differentiate individual intervention from structural reform?
The article posits that although acting suo motu in specific instances may result in immediate oversight, the advancement of the institution may only be achieved through the implementation of structural modifications to the system that incorporate supervisory mechanisms, enhancement of physical and human resources, better administration, and the upholding and empowerment of subordinate courts.
