Dissent, Judicial Independence and the Saintly Idea of the Bench

1. An Ancient Institution Answers a Modern Question

Some institutions outlive their buildings. Nalanda is one of them. At first glance, a fifth-century monastic university and a modern constitutional court belong to entirely different worlds — one a centre of scholastic learning, the other an apparatus of adjudication backed by the coercive power of the state. Yet beneath this difference lies a shared and uncomfortable question: what happens when a single mind refuses to accept the answer that the institution around it has already settled upon? That question runs from Nalanda to dissent, from dissent to judicial independence, and finally to the figure of the judge who must sometimes remain intellectually free while sitting inside the very institution whose authority he exercises. 

The question acquired unusual timeliness on 5 September 2026, when Chief Justice of India Surya Kant, addressing the BRICS Chief Justices’ Forum in New Delhi, urged the grouping to become a “living Nalanda University.” Speaking to judicial leaders from across the BRICS bloc and its partner countries — among them the heads of the top courts of Belarus, Bolivia, Kazakhstan, Uganda and Uzbekistan, and senior judges from Malaysia and Thailand — the CJI argued that Nalanda’s genius lay in never requiring scholars to agree on a common system of law or philosophy before it admitted them. It offered instead, he said, “a healthy and hospitable space for disagreement and deliberation,” and on that basis he proposed that BRICS “should also be known as the living Nalanda University.” The forum’s second day took up judicial cooperation, artificial intelligence, cross-border dispute resolution and the imperative of timely justice as conditions of institutional legitimacy.

That phrase — the living Nalanda — should not be read as civilisational ornament. It carries within it a theory of institutional life. A judiciary cannot remain independent by turning inward and intellectually isolating itself. Nor can it become genuinely international by surrendering its constitutional identity to whichever tradition speaks loudest. It must be capable of listening to another legal system without becoming subordinate to it; of disagreeing without treating disagreement as institutional betrayal; and of learning without mistaking learning for imitation. That is the difficult discipline of judicial dialogue: openness without surrender, disagreement without breakdown, authority without arrogance. 

2. What Nalanda Actually Was

Nalanda was not simply a ruin waiting to be rediscovered by modern rhetoric. UNESCO’s inscription of the Nalanda Mahavihara as a World Heritage Site describes it as a monastic and scholastic institution whose surviving remains span several centuries of organised intellectual transmission — an institution whose significance lies in its pedagogy, its architecture and the traditions of learning that grew up around it, with debate and dialectics forming a recognised part of that pedagogical inheritance. Later travel writing has emphasised its cosmopolitan reach: accounts drawing on the records of Chinese pilgrim-scholars such as Xuanzang and Yijing describe a centre that drew students from across Asia to study disciplines extending well beyond Buddhist philosophy. The precise figures attached to Nalanda’s library or its student body have sometimes been repeated with more confidence than the evidence strictly permits. But its essential character is not seriously contested: an institution built not merely to store settled knowledge but to expose it to argument.

This is the distinction that matters. A university that merely warehouses established propositions is not, in any meaningful sense, a place of learning; its deeper purpose is to test propositions against objection. Once an institution becomes afraid of disagreement, it grows epistemically fragile. It stops asking whether an idea can survive scrutiny and starts asking only whether the idea falls within the boundaries of what may currently be thought. One process produces inquiry. The other produces conformity dressed as consensus.

3. The Courtroom’s Different Burden

A court is not a university, and the difference matters. A university may leave a question open for a generation. A court, ordinarily, may not. A litigant needs an answer; a violated right needs a remedy; a legal system needs finality to function at all. The judge therefore carries a burden the scholar does not: the obligation to decide even when certainty is unavailable.

But this necessity creates its own danger. The requirement to decide can be quietly mistaken for the achievement of truth. A judgment may be final in its legal effect — binding the parties, settling the dispute, closing the file — while remaining entirely open to intellectual criticism, later reconsideration, and the corrective judgment of history. The strength of a legal system lies precisely in preserving that gap between finality and infallibility. Collapse that gap, and a court stops being an institution that reasons and becomes one that merely rules.

4. Draupadi’s Question and Vikarna’s Answer

Long before dissent became a constitutional right, it was already a scene in the epic imagination. In the Mahabharata, the dice have been thrown. Yudhishthira has lost his kingdom, his brothers and finally himself. Then comes the question that ought to have stopped the Kuru assembly cold: can a man who has already staked and lost himself still stake his wife? Draupadi does not plead for mercy. She asks for judgment — a considered answer, from the assembled elders and princes, to a question of law and legitimacy.

Vikarna, one of Duryodhana’s own brothers, rises to answer her. He argues that Draupadi could not have been legitimately staked, because Yudhishthira had already forfeited the capacity to stake anything, having lost himself first. Karna dismisses him as immature. Vidura objects too, but the assembly does nothing. Draupadi’s humiliation continues. Vikarna’s argument does not prevail — and yet the epic remembers him. He held no great authority in that room. He reversed nothing. He lost the moment entirely. But he was not lost to the story.

That is the first political lesson dissent teaches: a voice does not become insignificant merely because it fails to win. Sometimes the immediate consequence of speaking against the room is nothing at all — the institution continues, the majority continues, the machinery of power turns over exactly as before. But the dissenting voice leaves behind something the decision cannot fully erase: evidence that another answer was possible. Sometimes that residue changes nothing. Sometimes it becomes the seed of a different history.

5. Why the Arithmetic of Ninety-Nine to One Is Deliberately Uncomfortable

The value of the dissenting one does not lie in the one being right. It lies in the fact that the ninety-nine are not necessarily infallible. Dissent, understood this way, is not a romantic celebration of minorities; it is an argument against institutional certainty. A political community needs the standing possibility that its majority answer might be wrong. The unsettling question is not simply why should the one be heard — it is what happens to a society so certain of its own answer that it can no longer tolerate the question being asked at all.

This is older than any constitutional right that later came to protect it. Long before “dissent” acquired the vocabulary of free speech or academic freedom, it existed as a problem of knowledge: who decides what is true, who decides what may even be questioned, and — perhaps most tellingly — who has the authority to rule another person’s question illegitimate before it is even heard? Indian intellectual history is not short of traditions that pressed exactly this challenge against inherited premises — the materialist scepticism of Charvaka or Lokayata, and the philosophical counter-traditions of Buddhism and Jainism, each of which treated the terms of an argument, and not merely its conclusion, as fair ground for challenge. Their historical importance does not depend on declaring any one of them correct. It lies in showing that disagreement itself could function as a method of inquiry, and that dissent properly begins not with rejecting an answer but with refusing to accept that a question’s premises are beyond examination.

It is exactly here that Nalanda becomes relevant to the judiciary, and not merely as decoration. Nalanda should not be reconstructed as a twenty-first-century liberal campus transplanted into the fifth century — that would falsify its own historical context. But its intellectual life developed amid genuinely competing philosophical and religious traditions, with debate recognised as integral to its pedagogy. Used carefully, the metaphor holds: knowledge grows stronger when exposed to disciplined disagreement, not weaker.

Intellectual freedom, however, never floats free of institutions. Teachers need students; students need institutions; institutions need resources, administration and the political conditions that let them survive. Knowledge may like to imagine itself above power, but the structures that preserve it rarely are. Which is why the question moves, at this point, from who is permitted to think to what kind of institutional world makes thinking without permission possible at all.

6. The Long, Dangerous History of the Question

Socrates offers the classical instance. He questioned Athenians who believed they already knew what justice, virtue and wisdom meant — and his method did not merely offer competing answers, it exposed the fragility of their certainty. In 399 BCE he was tried and put to death. The deeper puzzle is not simply why Athens punished him, but why the act of questioning itself became politically intolerable. An argument, after all, can be answered. A question is more dangerous: it reopens what the institution had already declared closed.

The later histories of Hypatia, Ibn Rushd, Giordano Bruno and Galileo differ from one another too much to be flattened into a single formula of “science against religion.” What they share is a recurring institutional pathology: the moment an authority claims the power to fix the boundaries within which thought may legitimately move, disagreement risks being redefined as disobedience, disobedience as disloyalty, and disloyalty as grounds for silence. The dissenter becomes dangerous not necessarily because he holds a superior truth, but because his very presence disturbs an institution’s confidence that the truth has already been settled.

India’s own social history carries the same pattern, often turned not against the state but against the social order beneath it. Kabir questioned ritual authority and religious orthodoxy from within a devotional idiom that made the challenge harder to dismiss. Savitribai Phule confronted the structures of caste and gender that decided, in advance, whose voice would be permitted to count as knowledge — demonstrating that a right to speak is hollow if the social order has already decided who may be heard. B.R. Ambedkar pressed the argument further still, treating caste not as prejudice alone but as an architecture of hierarchy and power.

The 1936 episode surrounding Ambedkar’s undelivered presidential address to the Jat-Pat-Todak Mandal is instructive precisely because of how ordinary it appears. The organisers, uneasy with parts of the text he intended to deliver, cancelled the event; Ambedkar published the undelivered speech as Annihilation of Caste. He had been invited because his intellectual authority was undeniable. What proved difficult was not his presence but the implications of letting his argument stand unedited. Institutions, this episode suggests, often welcome dissent in the abstract and resist it the moment dissent turns its questions back upon the institution itself.

History has its own way of neutralising this discomfort with time. The radical becomes a reformer; the heretic becomes a thinker; the dangerous argument becomes a line on a commemorative plaque. But that domestication sets the wrong test. The real question is not whether an institution honours its dissenters once history has vindicated them — it is whether that institution can tolerate the argument before history has made it respectable.

7. Mill’s Ninety-Nine, and Why the Majority Needs the One

It was John Stuart Mill, in On Liberty, who gave this problem its classic liberal formulation. Imagining all of humanity minus one holding a single opinion, against one lone dissenter, Mill insisted that silencing the dissenter would be no more justified than the dissenter silencing all of mankind, “were he to have the power to do so.” His point was never that the lone dissenter must be right. If the minority view is correct, suppressing it robs society of a truth it needs. If it is wrong, confronting it forces society to understand and defend its own position with a clarity that unopposed belief never demands. On either reading, the majority needs the dissenter — not out of generosity, but because a majority cannot establish its own infallibility simply by counting heads.

This reframes the usual defence of free speech. It is ordinarily argued as an individual liberty — I have a right to say what I think. Mill’s deeper claim is collective: a society has an interest in hearing precisely what it does not want to hear. Protecting dissent, on this view, is not charity extended to minorities; it is an epistemic safeguard the majority builds for its own benefit, because silencing the dissenter forecloses, either way, a chance at correction.

8. From Colonial Sedition to Constitutional Relocation

Gandhi’s 1922 sedition trial, arising from his writings in Young India, shows what it looks like when a state treats political criticism itself as a threat to sovereign authority. Independent India’s constitutional order was built, in significant part, against that memory — enshrining freedom of speech and expression under Article 19(1)(a), subject to constitutionally defined and judicially reviewable restrictions. But a constitutional order does not eliminate the problem of dissent; it relocates it. The question that remains, permanently unresolved by any single settlement, is whether constitutional institutions can protect dissent even when — especially when — dissent becomes inconvenient to power.

9. The Judge as an Exile Within the Institution

This is the point at which the history of dissent becomes, specifically, the history of judicial independence. A judge is not merely a citizen holding an opinion. A judge wields institutional authority capable of determining liberty, property, reputation, citizenship and the very meaning of a constitutional right. Because that authority is so consequential, it demands an equally exacting internal discipline: the capacity to distinguish personal certainty from legal justification, personal preference from constitutional principle, and institutional loyalty from intellectual conformity.

An independent judge can therefore become something like an exile without ever leaving the courtroom — physically present on the bench while standing, intellectually, apart from the pressure of the room. The judge may disagree with colleagues, resist a popular position, question a settled doctrine, or write a dissent that changes nothing in the case at hand. Like Vikarna, the judge may lose the vote while preserving the question. Like Justice H.R. Khanna, the judge may become a minority of one and still leave an argument waiting for another generation.

Khanna offers Indian constitutional law’s clearest instance of the “ninety-nine versus one” problem in institutional form. In ADM Jabalpur v. Shivkant Shukla (1976), decided during the Emergency, the Supreme Court’s majority accepted the executive’s position that the right to move courts for habeas corpus stood suspended; Justice Khanna alone dissented, holding that the right to life and personal liberty could not be extinguished even in an Emergency. His dissent changed nothing in the outcome of that case. It cost him, by most accounts, the chief justiceship that would otherwise have been his. But it survived the majority that rejected it. When the Supreme Court, decades later in K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2017), decisively repudiated the reasoning of ADM Jabalpur, it did so in terms that expressly vindicated the constitutional principle Khanna alone had defended. The paradox is exact: a dissent can lose institutionally and win historically. The majority determines the law at a given moment; the dissent preserves the possibility that the law will later be understood differently. Dissent, in this sense, is not simply disagreement — it is constitutional memory, held in trust for a bench that has not yet convened.

This must not be mistaken for licence. Judicial dissent is not judicial rebellion. A dissenting judge remains bound by law, precedent, constitutional text and institutional discipline; the dissenter does not reject the court but participates in it while refusing to pretend that disagreement is impossible. A judge who treats personal conviction as superior to law is not exercising independence — he is abandoning the discipline that makes independence meaningful in the first place. Judicial independence means the freedom to reason according to law. It is not freedom from law.

10. The Court Needs Its Own Nalanda

This is precisely the intellectual culture CJI Surya Kant’s formulation gestures toward — not a physical university, but a habit of mind. Judges must be able to hear arguments that genuinely unsettle them. Benches must be able to disagree without treating disagreement as institutional betrayal. Comparative exposure to other constitutional traditions must be allowed to actually inform judicial reasoning, not merely decorate it. Judgments must remain open to scholarly and public criticism, because judicial authority ultimately rests on the quality of its reasons, not on the personality of the judge who wrote them. Placing disagreement inside the idea of judicial cooperation, rather than treating it as a threat to cooperation, is what gives the CJI’s Nalanda metaphor its force.

That said, “healthy disagreement” is not a synonym for disagreement in general. Personal attacks are not deliberation. Misinformation is not debate. Institutional sabotage is not judicial dialogue. Healthy disagreement demands reasons, evidence, intellectual honesty, and a genuine willingness to concede that the other side may have noticed something one has missed. It is not agreement wearing the costume of politeness — it is disagreement disciplined by the possibility of being persuaded.

This is also why the comparative dimension of judicial dialogue matters beyond ceremony. Courts today confront disputes that do not respect national borders — artificial intelligence, digital evidence, cross-border commerce, arbitration, environmental harm, migration and transnational crime. Comparative judicial exchange lets different legal systems observe one another’s institutional experiments without demanding that they first arrive at philosophical agreement. The goal is not uniformity; it is institutional learning — precisely the openness-without-surrender that a living Nalanda requires.

11. From Criticism to Delegitimisation

A companion concern runs alongside this vision of dialogue: judicial institutions and Chief Justices, in India and elsewhere, are increasingly becoming targets not merely of criticism but of coordinated misinformation, resignation campaigns and public delegitimisation. A mature judiciary must be able to draw a clear line between the two. Judges are not entitled to immunity from criticism — a judgment can be wrong, a remark can be unfortunate, and journalists, academics, lawyers and ordinary citizens must remain free to say so. That capacity for public criticism is part of what makes a judiciary answerable in a democracy at all.

The danger begins where criticism of reasoning turns into a campaign to destroy the credibility of the institution itself through fabrication or deliberately distorted narrative. The contemporary information environment sharpens this risk considerably: a remark stripped of context can be recirculated as a political statement; a partial quotation can acquire a meaning its original words never carried; a fabricated line can travel faster than the judgment it purports to describe. By the time a correction is issued, the distorted version may already have settled into public memory as fact.

Yet the corrective cannot run only in one direction. Judicial independence is not judicial immunity. Courts cannot ask citizens to treat every decision as morally beyond question, and a public culture that cannot tell the difference between engaged criticism and manufactured delegitimisation is itself a threat to the very independence it claims to protect. The problem is intensified by how visible a Chief Justice necessarily is: a complex institution gets compressed, in public perception, into a single figure, so that discrediting the person can be made to look like discrediting the institution. This is exactly why judicial independence cannot be allowed to rest on any one individual’s personal standing. It must rest on institutional depth — reasoned judgments, transparent procedure, professional administration, and a public culture capable of telling correction apart from destruction.

Nor does protecting an institution mean protecting it from correction. The strongest judicial system is not one in which judges never err; it is one equipped to identify and correct error without needing to destroy itself in the process. Appeals, review, larger benches, and later reconsideration by future courts are precisely the mechanisms through which a legal system builds in its own fallibility as a feature rather than treating it as a scandal.

12. Independence Also Needs Bricks

The philosophical language of independence eventually has to reach the physical courtroom, or it remains merely rhetorical. This is why CJI Surya Kant’s emphasis on timely and predictable justice belongs squarely within the same argument. Judicial independence means little to a litigant if the remedy, however sound in principle, arrives only after it has ceased to matter in fact.

The point translates into concrete infrastructure. On 3 January 2026, during his first official visit to Bihar, the CJI laid the foundation stones for seven infrastructure projects on the Patna High Court premises — an alternative dispute resolution building with an auditorium, an information technology block, an administrative building, multi-level parking, a hospital, residential accommodation for ministerial staff, and an annexe for the office of the Advocate General, together estimated at over ₹300 crore in outlay. He spoke of the occasion as carrying particular resonance in Bihar, “a land that occupies a distinctive place in India’s civilisational memory.” These are not merely construction projects. Courts require technology, administrative capacity, research infrastructure and functioning mechanisms for alternative dispute resolution if judicial authority is to mean anything beyond the text of a judgment. An institution cannot be intellectually independent while remaining administratively incapable of delivering justice on time. The courthouse, the IT system, the library and the ADR centre are, in this sense, as much a part of the constitutional story as any doctrine of dissent.

13. The Human Judge in an Age of Machines

The same forum’s engagement with artificial intelligence sharpens this task rather than displacing it. Technology can meaningfully assist legal research, case management, translation and evidentiary analysis. But a judicial decision carries a form of responsibility that cannot simply be delegated to a system, however sophisticated. A machine can detect patterns; it cannot inherit the moral and constitutional weight that attaches to a judge’s signature on an order affecting a human life. The human judge must remain capable of listening, doubting, weighing incommensurable claims, and explaining — in reasons a later court and a wider public can actually scrutinise — why one legal path was chosen over another. A judiciary that becomes efficient at the cost of this capacity for human judgment would not, for that reason, become more just.

14. The Saintly Judge, Reconsidered

This is the right context in which to reconsider the old, slightly overused image of the “saintly judge.” Judges are not saints merely by virtue of wearing robes; they carry the same personalities, ambitions and blind spots as everyone else. If the metaphor retains any constitutional meaning, it lies not in perfection but in self-limitation — in a judge’s understanding that extraordinary authority is temporary, that personal reputation cannot substitute for institutional legitimacy, and that a decision can be legally binding today while remaining intellectually open to challenge tomorrow.

The strongest judge, on this account, is not the one who never doubts, but the one who can tell the difference between doubt and indecision. The court must still decide. But the judge must remain capable of recognising error — which is exactly why reasoned judgments matter as much as the operative order itself. Reasons let the present explain itself to the future: they give lawyers something to challenge, scholars something to examine, and later benches something to reconsider. A judgment, understood this way, is not simply a command. It is a bridge between the authority of the present and the scrutiny of the future.

15. The Exiled Mind, and What the Ninety-Nine Owe the One

Exile, in this sense, need not mean geographical departure. A dissenter can remain physically inside the room and still cease to belong to it intellectually. Vikarna never left the Kuru assembly. Socrates never stopped being an Athenian. Ambedkar was, after all, invited to speak. Savitribai Phule stepped into an educational world that had been built to exclude people like her. Gandhi stood, by choice, before the very colonial court he refused to recognise as legitimate. Khanna sat, throughout, on the Supreme Court’s own bench. In each case, belonging and intellectual independence were held together only by tension, never by comfort. And sometimes that tension does eventually force a more literal exile — as it did, in very different ways and for very different reasons, in the later lives of writers and artists driven from their own countries by controversy, threat and legal harassment.

None of this makes the history of dissent a history of extraordinary individuals alone; it is, more fundamentally, a history of institutions and their capacity — or incapacity — to accommodate uncertainty. Not every dissenter is courageous, and not every minority view is correct; some deserve rejection on the merits, and protecting dissent is not the same thing as surrendering judgment. It is, instead, a way of protecting the process through which judgment can occur at all. The real danger a society faces is not that it might occasionally reach the wrong conclusion after honest debate. It is that it might eliminate, in advance, its own capacity to discover that it has done so.

16. Nalanda as a Future, Not Only a Past

Understood this way, Nalanda is less a monument to be admired than a standard to be met. It was, on the historical record, an extraordinary institution-builder, with debate written into its pedagogical inheritance. CJI Surya Kant’s “living Nalanda” gives that historical memory a specifically contemporary judicial vocabulary — dialogue, deliberation, difference, comparative learning, institutional hospitality. Its future, on this reading, does not require another building. It requires a habit of mind that courts, and the institutions that support them, choose to practise deliberately rather than merely invoke.

The one is not always right, and the majority is not always wrong. Dissent guarantees neither. What it guarantees is a safeguard against the premature declaration of certainty — which is exactly why it belongs, as a matter of constitutional design and not sentiment, inside the judiciary. The independent judge, like the genuine scholar, needs the courage to remain intellectually free inside an institution that must, nonetheless, decide. The saintly judge, if the phrase means anything at all, is not one who stands beyond error, but one who understands the danger of believing himself beyond it. The majority may write the judgment of the present. Dissent is what keeps the Constitution capable of speaking to a future the present cannot yet see.

As Mill put it, in a sentence that Indian constitutional history has since made its own: “If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”

That, in the end, is the constitutional meaning of Nalanda. Not that the one is always right. Not that the ninety-nine are always wrong. Not that every dissent deserves to be vindicated by history. It is that no institution — and no civilisation — should become so certain of its own wisdom that it destroys the very mechanism through which it might discover its own error. The Kuru assembly had power, but not the courage to hear the question it was asked. Khanna had the courage to ask his question when the majority believed the matter already closed. Nalanda represents the standing institutional possibility that a question can survive disagreement and outlast the room in which it was first raised. The modern judiciary’s task — the task CJI Surya Kant’s BRICS address quietly reopened — is to preserve exactly that possibility.

The real test of a constitutional civilisation is not how comfortably it accommodates its ninety-nine. It is how securely it protects the one — especially when that one voice forces the rest to confront a truth, an uncertainty, or an injustice it would much rather not hear.

 

Sources and References

1. LiveLaw, “BRICS Should Be A ‘Living Nalanda University’, CJI Says At BRICS Chief Justices’ Forum,” 5 September 2026.
2. ANI, “BRICS should become ‘living Nalanda University’: CJI Surya Kant bats for judicial dialogue, timely justice,” 5 September 2026.
3. India Legal, “BRICS Chief Justices Forum Day 2: CJI Surya Kant calls bloc a living Nalanda, underscores imperative of timely justice,” 5 September 2026.
4. LatestLY / IANS, “BRICS Should Become ‘living Nalanda University’: CJI Surya Kant Bats for Judicial Dialogue, Timely Justice,” 5 September 2026.
5. SocialNews.XYZ, “CJI Surya Kant calls for healthy disagreement, deliberation at BRICS Chief Justices’ Forum,” 5 September 2026.
6. Asianet Newsable, “BRICS should be a living Nalanda University, says CJI Surya Kant,” 6 September 2026.
7. UNESCO World Heritage Centre, Archaeological Site of Nalanda Mahavihara at Nalanda, Bihar — World Heritage List entry and statement of Outstanding Universal Value.
8. Sugato Mukherjee, “The mystery of India’s ancient centre of learning,” BBC Travel, February 2023.
9. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859), Chapter II, “Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion” — Project Gutenberg edition.
10. ADM Jabalpur v. Shivkant Shukla, (1976) 2 SCC 521 (Supreme Court of India).
11. Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) v. Union of India, (2017) 10 SCC 1 (Supreme Court of India).
12. B.R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste (1936; undelivered presidential address prepared for the Jat-Pat-Todak Mandal, Lahore).
13. The Constitution of India, Article 19(1)(a) and Article 19(2).
14. dtNext / PTI, “Capacity building in judicial infrastructure crucial to meet emerging demands: CJI Surya Kant,” 3 January 2026.
15. ETV Bharat, “CJI Surya Kant On Two-Day Visit To Patna From Saturday,” 2 January 2026.
16. Patna Press, “CJI Surya Kant Reaches Patna Today, to Launch Rs 302-Crore High Court Infrastructure Push” and “CJI Surya Kant Lays Foundation Stones for Major Infrastructure Expansion at Patna High Court,” January 2026.
17. Morung Express / IANS, “Technology key to transparent, accessible justice: CJI Surya Kant,” 3 January 2026.
18. The Mahabharata — the Dice Game and Disrobing episode (Sabha Parva).
19. Plato, Apology, on the trial of Socrates (399 BCE).