Chief Justice of India Surya Kant once described India’s post-independence journey as the uncertain steps of a young nation evolving into the confident stride of a “force of consequence”. The characterisation mirrors his own personal odyssey from the winding lanes of Petwar village in Haryana to the pinnacle of the Indian judiciary.
The audience in the chandeliered Ganatantra Mandap at Rashtrapati Bhavan, where he took the oath of office in Hindi on November 24, reflected a microcosm of his journey. Village elders, teachers, family and friends from Hisar, where he started his professional career and somewhere along the way lost his caste name ‘Sharma’, sat with foreign judges and high dignitaries.
Unlike his predecessors, who were variously seen as savvy, privileged or outspoken, Chief Justice Kant’s decisions and conduct on the Bench reflect a conscious effort to strike a balance grounded in good sense. At a time when the Supreme Court is moving towards more technology-driven solutions, Justice Kant chooses to remind everyone that justice is a “profoundly human enterprise” that no machine can replicate.
When cases worth crores elbow each other to get his attention on the Bench for an early hearing or a favourable order, Justice Kant cautions he is here for the “smallest litigant in the last row”. He argues that when law cultivates empathy for the “invisible victims” and intertwines lived realities, it ceases to be abstract and turns inclusive. Yet, the Supreme Court Collegium of which he has been a part and which he now leads, was unable to walk the talk on inclusivity and agree on a woman judge for Supreme Court.
In Justice Kant’s court, justice is not quick, but slow and sure. A nudge here, a poke there, but relief at the end. His oral observations in court may at times come across as harsh though balance is regained in the final order.
Take the case of former BJP spokesperson Nupur Sharma in July 2022. She was facing multiple FIRs in various States for her derogatory comments on Prophet Mohammed. The televised remarks had triggered violence. Justice Kant had remarked sharply, “this lady is single-handedly responsible for what is happening in the country”. Eighteen days later, his Bench directed that no coercive police action should be taken against Ms. Sharma.
In his six years on the Supreme Court Bench, Justice Kant has not been shy to shift his point of view. He cancelled the bail granted by the Allahabad High Court in a “tearing hurry” to Ashish Mishra, then Union Minister’s son and prime accused in the Lakhimpur Kheri killings case. The prosecution case centred on the SUV belonging to Mishra’s convoy mowing down farmers protesting controversial agricultural laws at a rally in Lakhimpur Kheri district of Uttar Pradesh in 2021.
Perceptive judge
In a 24-page judgment, Justice Kant, then a puisne judge, came down heavily on the High Court for denying the victims a chance to participate in the bail proceedings: “Victims certainly cannot be expected to be sitting on the fence and watching the proceedings from afar… It is the solemn duty of a court to deliver justice before the memory of an injustice eclipses”. However, months later, Mishra was granted interim bail by Justice Kant’s Bench; he also granted relief to four farmers languishing as undertrials in a counter FIR connected to the main Lakhimpur Kheri case.
Records of court hearings of his early years in the Supreme Court profile a perceptive judge who asked unfiltered questions to the power corridors. The Pegasus case hearings in 2021 found Justice Kant, a puisne judge on the Chief Justice Bench, insist that the government come clean on whether the Israel-origin, military-grade spyware violated citizens’ privacy.
However, earlier this year, when the case came up again for hearing, Justice Kant, now heading a Bench and poised to take over as top judge, changed course. This time his questions were directed at the petitioners instead of the government. One of them was “what is wrong if the country used that spyware for security reasons against anti-national elements?” The hearing was held a few days after the April 2025 Pahalgam terror attack.
In 2021, Justice Kant was one of the judges on the Bench which ordered the suspension of the sedition provision (Section 124A) of the erstwhile Indian Penal Code. Four years later, in 2025, Justice Kant, now heading the Bench, turned around to question if potential abuse of Section 152, a provision which criminalises acts endangering national sovereignty and considered a replacement of the previous sedition law, by the state could be a ground for declaring the provision unconstitutional. But the hearing also saw Justice Kant protect the petitioner-journalists from imminent arrest for the publication of a critical article, noting that “mere dissent cannot endanger sovereignty”.
Recent years have seen free speech knock on the doors of the Supreme Court for the right to breathe without fear. Justice Kant treats liberty of expression as a child who needs watching. He has called for effective guidelines to regulate user generated content posted online.
Justice Kant gave interim bail to academician Ali Khan Mahmudabad, hounded by the Haryana Police, for his social media posts on the sufferings caused by war and Operation Sindoor. But the judge also suspected the academician of “dog whistling” and formed a Special Investigation Team (SIT) of senior police officers to scour his online posts for “dual meaning”. But again, somehow, the order in Mahmudabad case came across as an effort to level the scales with an earlier direction, passed only a couple of days back, to form a similar SIT to go through the remarks made by a Madhya Pradesh Minister Vijay Shah about Col. Sofiya Qureshi. Justice Kant had termed the remarks of the BJP leader “crass, thoughtless”.
At the bottom of the urge to bring balance is a philosophy of pragmatism which has seen the judge negotiate peace between the farmers blocking the Shambhu border and the Union government besides coaxing Kerala to accept the Centre’s offer of ₹13,608 crore to tide over an immediate financial emergency.
A practical outlook lay behind his advice to States to bring in effective guidelines against private hospitals without taking a hardline approach which would discourage private investment in the health sector. In his judgment on a petition filed by expelled Bihar Legislative Council Member and RJD leader Sunil Kumar Singh challenging his ouster following his remarks against Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, Justice Kant said action taken by the House against an MP or MLA must be proportional to the degree of obstruction caused.
Need for transparency
Justice Kant had also realised the immediate need for transparency in the Special Intensive Revision exercise in Bihar, keeping the adjudication on the question of constitutionality of the process for later. The Presidential Reference Bench which he shared tries hard at equilibrium, opining that Governors cannot be fettered to timelines but States could seek judicial review in cases of glaring delays to clear pending Bills.
Justice Kant’s seeming efforts at balance in justice administration is at odds with the clear-cut political and ideological divisions in society. Justice B.R. Gavai, during a conversation on the day of his retirement as the Chief Justice of India, said the angst judges face in present-day India is that “if you do not decide against the government, you are not a good judge”.
The search for balance in a divided world is hard, unrewarding toil.
Justice Kant recounts his first case as a High Court judge, a cross-border custody dispute involving two minor children. Their parents, separated by national boundaries and strained by years of litigation, stood on opposite sides of the courtroom. Justice Kant was struck most by the quiet anguish of the children in that charged atmosphere, their anxious eyes shifting from one lawyer to the other.
He said, at that moment, “the grandeur of the law felt deeply personal, and the magnitude of my responsibility settled in. I realised then that justice is not only about resolving disputes, but about protecting the innocent from being lost in the storms of circumstance”.
Chief Justice Kant has time till February 9, 2027, an ample window to prove he is there for innocents “lost in the storms of circumstance”, like the crores of voters caught in the ‘SIR’ cyclone.
