Pig National Congress

When a Court Is Made to Say What It Never Said

Subject: In July 2012, a Supreme Court Bench headed by Justice R.M. Lodha, while hearing public-interest petitions concerning allegations of illegal and unethical clinical drug trials, criticised the authorities over the alleged treatment of vulnerable people as subjects of experimentation. The Bench observed that “human beings are being treated as guinea pigs”, calling the situation unfortunate and questioning the Government’s response to the allegations. The observation was made in the specific context of clinical drug trials and concerns regarding the protection of human life and dignity; it was not a political reference or a comment directed at any political party.

1. Imagine a sentence that was never spoken becoming the most consequential sentence in the country. A person leaves a courtroom and tells a friend that the Supreme Court called a political party a “pig”. The friend believes him. Someone posts it online. A headline follows. A television debate begins. Politicians demand an explanation. Within hours, a sentence that never existed acquires the authority of fact. The Court has said nothing; yet the nation begins arguing about what it supposedly said.
2. Now imagine that the fiction acquires an institutional life. A movement is formed: the Pig National Congress. Its symbol is a pig. Its social-media accounts reproduce the alleged judicial insult. Its speeches invoke the supposed humiliation. Its supporters transform an invented judicial remark into a political identity. Weeks later, the transcript is produced. The Court never said it. The fact has collapsed; the political meaning has not. This is the strange power of the digital age: a falsehood can lose its factual existence while retaining its political afterlife.
3. The question is not whether the Supreme Court should be criticised. It must be. A constitutional court is not a sacred object. Judges are not monarchs, judgments are not scripture, and judicial reasoning is not beyond examination. A political party may oppose a judgment. A lawyer may dismantle its reasoning. A citizen may protest. A journalist may investigate. Satire may mock. Democracy does not require reverence for judges. It requires accountability under law.
4. But criticism presupposes an object that actually exists. A question from the Bench is not necessarily a finding. An observation is not necessarily a judgment. A metaphor is not necessarily a proposition of law. Counsel’s submission is not the Court’s conclusion. An exchange during oral hearing cannot automatically be converted into an institutional declaration. The first discipline of criticism, therefore, is astonishingly simple: criticise what was actually said.
5. That simple discipline has become difficult because the courtroom now possesses a second life outside the courtroom. Judicial speech enters a world of clips, memes, thumbnails, hashtags and algorithmic amplification. A sentence may travel farther in thirty seconds on a mobile screen than a judgment travels in thirty years through law reports. The courtroom moves through reason; the digital ecosystem moves through velocity.
6. Courts depend upon context. Virality depends upon extraction. Courts distinguish a question from a conclusion; the internet frequently erases the distinction. A judge may spend an hour examining the weaknesses of an argument, but a seven-second clip can make the judge appear to have endorsed it. The fragment defeats the whole. The quotation defeats the context. The spectacle defeats the record.
7. This is not merely a problem of journalism. It is a constitutional problem. If a Judge says A and the public is persuaded that the Judge said B, then criticism of B is not criticism of the Judge’s actual judicial conduct. It is criticism of an invented judicial personality. The Court has been made to assume a position it never adopted. A fabricated quotation can therefore manufacture a conflict between constitutional institutions that never existed.
8. The danger is reciprocal. The political party allegedly insulted suffers reputational injury; the Court falsely portrayed as its antagonist suffers institutional injury. One false sentence can wound both sides of a constitutional relationship. The tragedy is that neither may have said or done what the public believes. Yet both can be compelled to live with the consequences.
9. Judicial dignity must therefore be understood carefully. It cannot become a synonym for judicial immunity. A Judge who is wrong must be told so. A judgment that violates constitutional principle must be challenged. Judicial power must be examined with intellectual severity. The Constitution did not create Judges who are incapable of error. It created institutions whose errors must remain open to correction.
10. But there is an equal constitutional proposition: a Judge should not be condemned for words the Judge never uttered. The Bar’s responsibility is not to protect Judges from legitimate criticism. It is to protect the judicial record from illegitimate distortion. These are entirely different duties, and confusing them impoverishes both judicial accountability and judicial independence.
11. The Bar is sometimes described as the “mouthpiece of the Bench”.[i] Properly understood, that phrase should mean responsibility, never servility. An advocate who merely praises a Judge is not necessarily loyal to justice. Indeed, the most valuable lawyer may sometimes be the one who tells the Court, respectfully and fearlessly, that it is wrong.
12. Yet independence from the Bench must not become hostility towards the Bench. The lawyer who speaks when the Court errs and remains silent when the Court is falsely represented is exercising only half of professional courage. Constitutional fidelity demands both: the courage to challenge power and the courage to defend truth when power is being falsely attributed.
13. That is the difference between loyalty to a Judge and loyalty to justice. The former can degenerate into personality worship. The latter requires institutional independence. An advocate’s ultimate allegiance is neither to an individual Judge nor to an individual litigant. It is to the administration of justice, the integrity of the record and the constitutional order.
14. India possesses an older vocabulary for this obligation. Justice is not merely the production of an order. It is a moral and constitutional search for truth. Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer repeatedly reminded Indian jurisprudence that law lives within a larger universe of human dignity, compassion and justice. The constitutional imagination gives the proposition its most concise expression: Satyameva Jayate — truth alone triumphs.
15. The Mahabharata gives another formulation: Yato Dharmaḥ, Tato Jayaḥ — where there is Dharma, there is victory. And the Sikh expression Sat Sri Akal evokes the timelessness of truth. These are not merely civilisational ornaments. They describe a discipline. Public life cannot survive if truth itself becomes factional — one truth for one political camp, another truth for another, and a third truth for the algorithm.
16. The history of India’s highest court also reminds us that institutions grow with the society they serve. The Federal Court created under the Government of India Act, 1935 began functioning in 1937 with a Chief Justice and two puisne judges. The Supreme Court came into being on January 28, 1950, with a sanctioned strength of eight judges.
17. The numbers are more than administrative arithmetic. They tell the story of a Republic whose constitutional questions multiplied as its democracy deepened. Eight judges once sat in a young republic whose constitutional vocabulary was still being formed. Thirty-eight judges now confront a society of extraordinary scale, complexity and contradiction. The Court has grown because India has grown.
18. And India is not culturally monochrome. It is a plural country: multilingual, multiregional, multi-traditional and socially diverse. The Judges who constitute its highest court emerge from that plurality. They carry different histories, accents, educational experiences, mother tongues and cultural instincts into the courtroom.
19. A Judge may therefore possess a beautiful and distinctive way of expressing an idea, shaped by a mother tongue or a regional culture. That expression may be metaphorical, idiomatic, direct or culturally specific. It should be judged for its legal meaning and institutional consequence, not for whether it resembles the polished metropolitan idiom of an elite seminar room.
20. There is a deeper danger here. Vernacular, culturally direct and non-elite modes of institutional speech — particularly those associated with rural and non-metropolitan traditions — are increasingly subjected to disproportionate ridicule within elite digital ecosystems. Accent becomes evidence of intellect. Idiom becomes evidence of prejudice. A phrase rooted in one linguistic culture is translated into another and then judged without the cultural context that produced it.
21. That would be an impoverished understanding of constitutional India. The Republic cannot demand that every Judge sound like a metropolitan constitutional theorist. A constitutional democracy should be able to hear many registers of Indian speech without confusing linguistic style with legal doctrine.
22. The test must remain more demanding and more democratic: What was said? In what context? By whom? In response to what? Was it counsel’s submission, a question from the Bench, an observation, a hypothetical, a metaphor, or a final determination? These distinctions may appear technical to the public, but they are the grammar of judicial responsibility.
23. The record is therefore not a bureaucratic afterthought. It is the institutional memory of the Republic. A judgment preserves reasons. A transcript preserves context. Together they prevent memory from becoming mythology. When the record is displaced by recollection, and recollection is displaced by virality, constitutional history itself becomes vulnerable to fabrication.
24. India has experienced before what happens when institutions fail to resist power. The Emergency remains the most enduring warning. Constitutional catastrophe does not arise solely because one branch becomes powerful. It also arises when other institutions lose the courage, independence or imagination necessary to restrain it.
25. The later development of judicial review, fundamental rights and the basic structure doctrine was shaped by the recognition that constitutional safeguards are meaningful only when institutions possess the courage to enforce them. The history of the Republic is therefore not merely a history of laws. It is a history of institutional courage — and institutional failure.
26. This is why the striking proposition from the Allahabad High Court judgment in Mohammad Kafeel v. State of U.P., (Criminal Misc. Bail Application, Neutral Citation No.2024:AHC-LKO:84836) deserves attention: “Law dies twice, once when its officers turn criminal, and again when Judges choose silence over judicial courage.” The sentence identifies two species of institutional decay — corruption by those entrusted with law and paralysis by those entrusted with judgment.
27. The judgment invokes the Mahabharata’s Draupadi episode: Dushasana commits the wrong while Dhritarashtra, possessing authority capable of intervening, remains passive. The lesson is not that every contemporary constitutional dispute is an epic battlefield. It is subtler: authority carries responsibility, and silence by authority can sometimes become part of the history of the wrong.
28. The principle can be extended carefully. If law is endangered when its officers corrupt it, the integrity of law is also endangered when the judicial record is distorted and those capable of restoring the truth remain silent. Falsehood acquires institutional strength when truthful people become institutionally timid.
29. That is why judicial courage cannot mean only deciding against the powerful. It also means resisting the seductions of the crowd. A courageous Judge may have to withstand political pressure, media criticism, social-media outrage, accusations of bias and even misunderstanding. Judicial independence is tested not only when a Judge is applauded for being brave, but when the Judge is unpopular for having exercised constitutional judgment.
30. The same moral demand applies to the Bar. Lawyers cannot demand judicial courage and simultaneously punish Judges for being institutionally independent. Nor can lawyers demand judicial independence while treating criticism of judges as sacrilege. A mature Bar must be capable of two apparently contradictory acts: confronting judicial error and defending judicial independence.
31. The history of Public Interest Litigation offers another lesson. Justices P.N. Bhagwati and V.R. Krishna Iyer helped transform the Indian judiciary into a constitutional forum more accessible to those historically excluded from conventional litigation. That transformation enlarged the democratic reach of the Court. But every enlargement of judicial power creates a corresponding need for self-restraint.
32. Anuj Bhuwania’sCourting the People provides an uncomfortable counter-history of PIL, questioning some of the celebratory narratives surrounding judicial intervention and examining the expansion of judicial power. Its importance lies not in rejecting public interest litigation, but in reminding us that constitutional power must remain accountable even when exercised in the name of public interest.
33. The lesson is universal: the public interest must remain genuinely public. Constitutionalism cannot become publicity masquerading as constitutionalism. A court cannot become stronger merely because it becomes more visible, and a constitutional cause does not become more legitimate merely because it becomes more viral.
34. This is also why political parties must exercise constitutional imagination. A political party may oppose a judgment. It may argue that the Court has misunderstood the Constitution. It may campaign for legislative reform within constitutional limits. It may sharply criticise judicial doctrine. None of this is anti-democratic.
35. But there is a line between opposing a judgment and treating the constitutional court itself as a partisan enemy. The first is democracy. The second risks institutional delegitimisation. The Constitution does not require political parties to agree with the Supreme Court. It requires them to recognise that the Court is a constitutional institution whose legitimacy cannot rise and fall with electoral convenience.
36. This principle applies with equal force to the ruling party and the Opposition. The ruling party may discover that judicial review is inconvenient today. The Opposition may discover that judicial distrust is politically profitable today. But governments change, majorities change and political fortunes reverse. The institution weakened for one’s immediate advantage may become the institution one desperately needs tomorrow.
37. An Opposition is not merely anti-government. It is government-in-waiting. A political party that weakens constitutional institutions while out of power may eventually discover that it has dismantled the very safeguards upon which it hoped to rely after acquiring power.
38. Nor can the ruling party defend judicial independence only when judgments favour it. Constitutional institutions cannot be treated like political allies: legitimate when convenient, illegitimate when inconvenient. If the legitimacy of the judiciary depends upon the political consequences of its decisions, constitutionalism has already surrendered to majoritarian arithmetic.
39. This is where the imaginary Pig National Congress becomes more than a joke. It is a warning about the manufacture of political reality. A word is extracted from context. The extraction becomes a clip. The clip becomes a headline. The headline becomes a slogan. The slogan becomes an identity. The identity becomes a political organisation.
40. Eventually, the country is invited to debate a confrontation between the Supreme Court and a political party that never occurred. The transcript is produced only afterwards. The Court never said what it was accused of saying. Yet the political consequences may remain. In the digital age, correction often travels at the speed of a tortoise while falsehood travels like fire.
41. This is why misquotation is not a minor journalistic error. It can manufacture institutional conflict. It can transform judicial speech into political ammunition. It can make a constitutional court appear to have entered electoral politics. And once that perception takes root, the Court may be forced to defend an institutional position it never adopted.
42. The problem is intensified by the commercialisation of courtroom language. Judicial remarks now possess an algorithmic afterlife: they can generate clicks, television debates, social-media engagement, political mobilisation and commercial traffic. A sentence spoken in a courtroom can become content before it has even acquired meaning.
43. Yet the answer cannot be censorship. Nor can it be judicial immunity. Satire must remain possible. Political disagreement must remain possible. Journalistic investigation must remain possible. Public criticism must remain possible. The answer is more demanding: accuracy, context, verification and responsibility.
44. The journalist must verify before amplifying. The advocate must contextualise before interpreting. The political actor must hesitate before weaponising. The citizen must ask before believing. The Judge must remain open to criticism without surrendering institutional independence. Each participant in the constitutional ecosystem has a different duty, but the common object is truth.
45. The books Judges write after retirement offer another dimension of this institutional memory. Ranjan Gogoi’s Justice for the Judge is an autobiographical account of his judicial career and its controversies. D.Y. Chandrachud’s Why the Constitution Matters, published in 2025, brings together reflections on fundamental rights, democracy, pluralism, dissent, free speech and the rule of law.
46. In July 2026, The Voice of Justice: Justice Gavai Speaks was released, bringing together speeches, lectures and reflections of former Chief Justice B.R. Gavai. Such works remind us that judicial office is not merely an institutional position. It is also an intellectual and human experience whose full dimensions may become visible only with time.
47. Such books are not merely memoirs. They are fragments of institutional memory. They tell future generations what judicial office looked like from inside the robe — what pressures existed, what choices were made, what principles were defended, and what compromises were resisted. The historian of tomorrow will not read only judgments. The historian will also read the memories of those who wrote them.
48. There is therefore something poignant in the idea that Judges may become fully audible only after retirement. A constitutional culture should not require every Judge to wait until leaving office before the public can appreciate the intellectual and human dimensions of judicial responsibility. The answer is not to encourage Judges to become public commentators. It is to create a public culture mature enough to distinguish disagreement from hostility.
49. We should also be careful with words such as “lynching”. Criticism is not lynching. Satire is not lynching. Protest is not lynching. A harsh newspaper editorial is not lynching. A political attack on a judgment is not lynching. But when a person is condemned for words never spoken, when context is deliberately amputated, and when repetition is substituted for verification, criticism can mutate into something darker.
50. The constitutional task, therefore, is neither to create an untouchable judiciary nor to abandon the judiciary to the crowd. India needs a judiciary capable of being criticised, a Bar capable of dissent, a press capable of verification, political parties capable of disagreement without institutional vandalism, and citizens capable of distinguishing evidence from atmosphere.
51. The Supreme Court does not need a political party to defend it. Nor should any political party become the custodian of judicial legitimacy. The Court belongs to the Constitution, not to the ruling party, the Opposition, the Bar, the media or any social constituency. Its authority must come from law, reason and the public confidence generated by both.
52. And yet there is another danger: the tyranny of what is called “common sense”. Common sense is useful when it is grounded in experience; it becomes dangerous when it mistakes immediacy for truth. When “common sense” goes berserk, “good sense” must prevail — or, at the very least, must be given a voice. For common sense can sometimes be nothing more than the speed with which a crowd reaches a conclusion. Good sense begins where that speed ends: with context, verification, proportion and the humility to ask whether what everyone thinks happened actually happened.
53. In a constitutional democracy, good sense is not timidity. It is disciplined courage. It does not demand silence; it demands that speech be worthy of the truth it claims to represent. It does not ask the citizen to trust the Court blindly, nor the journalist to trust the lawyer, nor the lawyer to trust the Judge. It asks something more difficult of everyone: before judgment, examine the evidence; before outrage, recover the context; before repeating, verify.
54. Perhaps, then, the first response to the next sensational claim about something allegedly said by the Supreme Court should not be outrage. It should not be celebration. It should not even be disbelief. It should be a lawyer’s oldest and simplest question: “Show me the record.” Which hearing? Which Judge? What was the complete exchange? Was it a question, an observation, a metaphor, counsel’s submission or a finding? Before deciding who insulted whom, who attacked whom, or whether the Court has entered political combat, we must establish the most elementary fact: what actually happened?
55. That is more than a lawyer’s discipline. It is a constitutional discipline. A democracy that cannot distinguish between a judgment and a rumour, between an observation and a holding, between criticism and fabrication, will eventually lose something more valuable than institutional prestige: it will lose its capacity to reason together. India does not need an untouchable judiciary, nor an abandoned judiciary; it needs a courageous judiciary, an independent Bar, a responsible press, politically mature parties and citizens capable of resisting the seductions of instant certainty. The great contest of our constitutional age is therefore not between the Court and politics, nor between the Bench and the Bar. It is between truth and its manufactured substitutes. The turning point will not come when the Court becomes stronger than politics. It will come when politics, the Bar, the media and the public become strong enough to preserve the truth about the Court. Satyameva Jayate. Yato Dharmaḥ, Tato Jayaḥ. Truth is timeless.

Raja Choudhary is the author and founder of Nalanda. He studied law at SOAS, University of London and the University of Delhi, and graduated in Sanskrit from Hindu College after completing his Class XII education at C.M. College, Darbhanga. He is from the OBC community, but received a scholarship intended for members of the Scheduled Caste community through Dr. Ratan Lal, an opportunity he regards with lasting gratitude and responsibility. He writes this article in the spirit of that intellectual debt, believing that education carries a duty to contribute to constitutional democracy. He has also used AI in preparing this article and believes that its responsible use is not objectionable; like any research tool, it can assist thought and language, while responsibility for the facts, arguments and conclusions remains entirely with the author.

“We, the People” is a famous collection of essays and reflections written by eminent jurist and constitutional expert Nani A. Palkhivala. Sources. T.M. Krishna and Aakash Singh Rathore, We, the People: Decoding a Nation’s Symbols; Ambedkar’s Preamble: A Secret History of the Constitution of India; Zakia Soman, We, the People: The Muslim Majority of India; and J. Sai Deepak, India, That Is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution, a study of India’s political and constitutional history through the encounter between Indian civilisation and European colonialism, beginning with the Papal Bull Romanus Pontifex of 1455. These works offer distinct perspectives on India’s constitutional identity, citizenship, pluralism, civilisation and institutional evolution.Sources and factual basis of the recent Indian incidents discussed in this essay are based on contemporaneous reports of the controversy concerning oral observations attributed to Justice Dipankar Datta; the litigation and public controversy surrounding the Supreme Court’s directions in the stray-dog matter involving Justice J.B. Pardiwala; the reported threats and subsequent attack involving the family of retired Bombay High Court Judge Justice Gautam S. Patel; Tabassoom Khatoon, a Judge in M.P. and the October 6, 2025 incident in which an advocate attempted to hurl a shoe towards Chief Justice B.R. Gavai during proceedings in the Supreme Court. The shoe did not reach the Bench, proceedings continued, and Chief Justice Gavai subsequently described the episode as a “forgotten chapter”. (The Indian Express) These incidents are presented as distinct factual events and not as legally identical forms of hostility towards Judges.The regional comparison draws on recent events in Bangladesh and Nepal. In Bangladesh, protesters surrounded the Supreme Court in August 2024 and demanded the resignation of Chief Justice Obaidul Hassan and other judges; the Chief Justice and five Appellate Division judges subsequently resigned amid the protests. (bdnews24.com) In Nepal, the September 2025 protests resulted in the Supreme Court and other courts being set on fire, with reports that court case files, historical records, archives and precedents were destroyed; contemporary reporting specifically records the burning of Supreme Court files, including material relating to the Maoist conflict. (kathmandupost.com) These facts are invoked not to suggest that the three countries experienced identical events, but to raise a broader constitutional question: what happens to the rule of law when public anger ceases to distinguish between disagreement with a decision and an attack upon the institution that preserves the record of justice?