बेबाक · Editorial
When Courts Must Order the Obvious: The Executive Is Outsourcing Its Duties to the Bench
From police contempt to school bullying, High Courts are doing administrative work the executive should have done; the fix is better departments, not more litigation.
A Week in the Courts
Read together, recent orders from India's courts describe an executive that waits to be told. The Telangana High Court sentenced a Miyapur Circle Inspector to four weeks' simple imprisonment and a fine of Rs 2,000 for wilfully disobeying judicial directions to provide police protection in a property dispute. The same court expressed dissatisfaction with the School Education Department's handling of representations from DSC-2002 candidates seeking appointment as Hindi Pandit Grade-II teachers. A High Court directed schools to address bullying based on gender identity and sexual orientation. It acted on a petition by the mother of a 16-year-old boy, a student at a prominent Faridabad school, who died on February 24, 2022. None of this required new law. It required officials to do their jobs.
The Core Tension
There is a real argument for judicial vigilance. When a police officer ignores a court order, contempt is the proper response, because a citizen's protection cannot depend on an inspector's discretion. When a school fails a vulnerable child, a court that sets standards may save the next one. Against this stands an equally serious concern. Courts are not built to run police stations, staff schools or draft departmental circulars. Every guideline issued from the Bench is one the executive did not write. Each such order also adds to dockets already strained by delay, and pulls judges away from cases only they can decide. Both points are true, and that is why the pattern deserves attention.
Restraint and Its Lessons
The Supreme Court itself showed what restraint looks like. A seven-judge Bench led by Chief Justice of India Surya Kant upheld the States' power to levy additional sales tax but held that the reference in the Orissa Sales Tax Act case no longer needed adjudication, because the challenged provisions had been amended and the Goods and Services Tax now governs the issue going forward. Legislation, not litigation, had largely settled the question. Elsewhere, the Election Commission, following up on its affidavit before the Supreme Court, separated the new voter enrolment form from its accompanying declaration in the online version in states where the SIR exercise is underway. The change was sensible, and the Commission deserves credit for acting on its commitment. That it followed court proceedings rather than preceded them is the point. Institutions should fix their processes on their own initiative.
Where Petitions Point
Some petitions show how this gap could close. A public interest litigation before the Madras High Court seeks directions to the Tamil Nadu Director General of Police to frame guidelines on registering criminal cases over social media posts, political criticism and online speech. The litigant points out that the Telangana High Court framed such guidelines for the police in that State last year. A State government could adopt a neighbour's framework without waiting to be told. The Supreme Court's call for a fresh look at two-child norms, citing a fertility rate that fell to 1.9 in 2024 and warning of the long-term consequences of an ageing population, raises a policy question for legislatures. Courts can raise it. They should not have to answer it alone.
The Way Forward
The Chief Justice of the High Court of Meghalaya, Justice Revati Mohite Dere, made the case this week for mediation as an effective alternative to prolonged adversarial litigation. The executive should take the same lesson. Three steps would help. First, every State should publish a time-bound grievance protocol for service matters such as teacher appointments, so that representations get reasoned decisions before they become writ petitions. Second, State police chiefs should issue written norms on speech-related FIRs, drawing on the guidelines framed in Telangana. Third, education departments should require school anti-bullying policies that explicitly cover gender identity and sexual orientation. Courts should be the last resort of the citizen, not the first manager of the State.
A republic in which a teaching aspirant, a litigant seeking police protection and a grieving mother must each go to court to get what the rules already promise has a governance problem.
What this editorial rests on
Drawn from our live multi-newsroom feed — read the reporting at source.
An editorial is the considered opinion of the FarziUPSC desk, argued from the sourced reporting above and written under our published persona, बेबाक. We name institutions, not parties. If we are wrong, we will say so. How we work →