Avidya: On the Forgetting of Justice — A Citizen's Inquiry

 Avidya

अविद्या

On the Forgetting of Justice — A Citizen's Inquiry

A follow-up to 'When the Court Closes Its Doors'

February 2026 | opensaurabh.blogspot.com

"Procedure triumphing the cause of justice."— Justice Ujjal Bhuyan, in his concurring judgment on Arvind Kejriwal's CBI arrest, describing what his colleague on the same bench had done.

Before We Begin: A Word on Avidya

In the Vedantic tradition, avidya does not mean ignorance in the ordinary sense — the absence of knowledge. It means something far more specific and far more dangerous: the forgetting of one's essential nature. The veil that descends not over what we know, but over what we are.

A judge who has forgotten the purpose of justice has not lost legal knowledge. He knows the rules. He applies them correctly. He speaks in the precise language of procedure and precedent. What he has lost — what the veil has descended over — is the memory of what the rules are for. Who they were written to protect. Whose suffering they were designed to prevent. What courts exist to do.

This article examines three cases in which two judges — Justice Surya Kant and Justice Ujjal Bhuyan — sat on the same bench, heard the same arguments, examined the same record, and reached opposite conclusions. We do not examine these cases to accuse either judge of corruption or bad faith. We examine them to ask a more fundamental question: when two trained judicial minds, sworn to the same Constitution, cannot agree on what justice requires in the same case — what does that disagreement reveal about the nature of justice itself? And what does it mean for the common citizen who has nowhere else to go?

Gandhi taught us that avidya — forgetting — is not confined to individuals. Institutions forget too. And when an institution forgets its purpose while retaining its power, it becomes the most dangerous thing in a democracy: authority without conscience.

But Gandhi also taught us something else. That the remedy for institutional forgetting is not to wait for the institution to remember. It is for the citizen to remember first. To educate himself. To know his rights. To understand the system that governs him. To stop outsourcing justice — and reclaim it as his own responsibility.

That is the purpose of this article. Not to condemn. To remind.

I. Two Judges, One Bench: The Puzzle

Imagine two doctors examining the same patient, reading the same test results, hearing the same symptoms — and reaching opposite diagnoses. Not on a fine point of medical judgment, but on the basic question of whether the patient is ill at all. We would not say this reflects the complexity of medicine. We would say something has gone wrong — in one doctor's training, in his attention, or in his understanding of what a doctor is for.

Between February 2024 and February 2026, Justice Surya Kant and Justice Ujjal Bhuyan sat together on multiple Supreme Court benches. In three significant cases — each involving fundamental rights, each touching the relationship between the citizen and state power — they reached opposite conclusions. Not on peripheral questions. On the basic question of what the court should do when a citizen's rights are at stake.

These are not two judges of different legal traditions or different constitutional frameworks. They are both senior Supreme Court judges of the same court, applying the same Constitution, bound by the same oath. Their disagreements are therefore not merely interesting. They are revelatory. They reveal that two people can read the same Constitution and understand it to mean fundamentally different things — because they have fundamentally different understandings of what a court is for.

Let us examine each disagreement carefully — not to judge the judges, but to understand the nature of the disagreement itself.

II. The Three Disagreements: Documented and Examined

Case 1: The Arrest of Arvind Kejriwal — September 2024

The facts before the bench were not in dispute. Both judges had access to the same timeline:

The CBI registered its case against Kejriwal in August 2022.

The CBI interrogated Kejriwal in April 2023.

For 22 months, the CBI did not arrest him.

A trial court granted Kejriwal bail in the ED case.

The day after that bail order, the CBI arrested him.

At the time of arrest, Kejriwal had not even been named as an accused by the CBI.

These are not contested facts. They are the documented timeline of events that both judges read before writing their judgments.

Justice Surya Kant asked: Did the CBI follow procedure? He found that it had — that Kejriwal's evasive responses during interrogation provided sufficient legal justification for the arrest. Procedure was satisfied. Arrest upheld.

Justice Bhuyan asked a different question: Why did the CBI do this? And his answer — in his own published words — was devastating in its simplicity:

"When the CBI did not feel the necessity to arrest the appellant for 22 long months, I fail to understand the great hurry and urgency on the part of the CBI to arrest the appellant when he was on the cusp of release in the ED case."

He went further — articulating the foundational principle of criminal justice that his colleague had not engaged with at all:

"An accused is innocent until proven guilty by a competent court, following due process. This court has been reiterating that bail is the rule and jail is the exception. As such, the courts at all levels must ensure that the process leading to and including the trial does not end up becoming the punishment itself."

And then — in five words that are the epigraph of this article and the precise description of what his colleague had done — Justice Bhuyan named the problem:

"Procedure triumphing the cause of justice."

In February 2026, the trial court acquitted Arvind Kejriwal. It found that the investigation had proceeded on a 'predetermined trajectory' and that Kejriwal had been named 'without any credible material.' The court that had imprisoned him for months had validated an investigation the trial court subsequently found was not credible.

Justice Bhuyan had seen this coming. Justice Surya Kant had not — or had chosen not to look. The question this  article asks is: why?

Case 2: The Assam Gun Video — February 2026

BJP Assam's verified official handle posted a video of Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma firing shots, intercut with AI-generated images of Muslim men bearing captions: 'No mercy,' 'Point blank shoot,' 'Why did you not go to Pakistan?' and 'Foreigner free Assam.' The video was deleted after widespread outrage. Petitioners — including CPI(M), CPI leader Annie Raja, and Assamese scholar Hiren Gohain — approached the Supreme Court seeking FIR registration and an independent probe.

Justice Surya Kant asked: Is this the right forum? Are the petitioners' motives legitimate? He found: no and no. The petition was characterised as a 'calculated effort' and pre-election politics. Petitioners were directed to the Gauhati High Court — the court operating within Assam, the very state whose Chief Minister was the subject of the petition. Even a request for a neutral forum outside Assam was denied.

Justice Bhuyan asked: Has a constitutional duty been violated? And he answered — clearly, on the record, in the same bench:

"It is constitutionally impermissible for anybody — state or non-state actors — through any medium, to vilify and denigrate any community. This is particularly true for public figures occupying high constitutional office who have taken the solemn oath to uphold the Constitution."

Notice what happened here. Justice Bhuyan stated a clear constitutional principle. Justice Surya Kant did not disagree with it. He did not say 'I find this principle inapplicable here' or 'the video does not meet this threshold.' He simply did not engage with it. He looked past it — as if it had not been said. As if the question of a minority community's constitutional protection was not the question before the court.

But it was. Justice Bhuyan saw it. Justice Surya Kant looked past it. That is not a disagreement of legal opinion. It is a disagreement about what the court is for.

Senior Advocate Singhvi cited 17 cases in which the Supreme Court had entertained matters of lesser gravity directly. No answer was offered. The same Article 32 that Dr. Ambedkar called 'the very soul of the Constitution' — the citizen's direct right to approach the Supreme Court for the enforcement of fundamental rights — was unavailable to those seeking protection for a threatened minority community.

The same bench, in the same weeks, directed High Courts in West Bengal and Tamil Nadu to stand down and keep petitions in abeyance in the SIR electoral rolls case — pulling jurisdiction upward from opposition-state courts while pushing jurisdiction downward in the Assam case. The directional asymmetry is documented in the first article in this series.

Case 3: The Vanashakti Environmental Clearances — 2025

The original Supreme Court judgment had barred post-facto environmental clearances — a protective ruling that upheld the precautionary principle, one of the foundational doctrines of environmental law. The precautionary principle holds that where there is credible risk of harm to the environment, protective action must be taken even before scientific certainty is established. It is not a controversial doctrine. It is settled law.

A review bench led by Chief Justice Surya Kant recalled that judgment — effectively restoring the ability to grant post-facto clearances. The majority found sufficient procedural grounds for review.

Justice Bhuyan dissented. He called it 'a step in retrogression' and warned that permitting post-facto clearances dilutes the precautionary principle and undermines sustainable development norms. He was not weighing the same evidence differently. He was saying the court was moving backward from a well-established protective standard — retreating from a commitment to the environment that the court had already made.

Once again: Surya Kant asked the procedural question — do the grounds for review exist? Bhuyan asked the purposive question — does this serve the protective purpose of environmental law? And once again they reached opposite conclusions.

III. The Nature of the Disagreement: Opinion, Facts, or Purpose?

Having examined the three cases, we can now answer the question my first article implicitly raised and this article makes explicit: what kind of disagreement is this?

There are three kinds of judicial disagreement. The first is disagreement of opinion — two judges agree on the facts but weigh them differently. This is normal, expected, and healthy in any legal system. The second is disagreement of basic facts — two judges examine the same record and reach opposite conclusions about what it shows. This is more troubling, because facts are not supposed to be a matter of opinion.

The third kind is the most serious. It is disagreement of purpose — two judges are, at a fundamental level, answering different questions. Not weighing the same things differently, but sitting in different courts entirely — one asking what procedure requires, the other asking what justice demands.

The Bhuyan-Suryakant disagreements are of the third kind. And Justice Bhuyan himself named this precisely. When he wrote 'procedure triumphing the cause of justice,' he was not saying his colleague had made a legal error. He was saying his colleague had answered the wrong question. Had applied the right rules to the wrong inquiry. Had let the instrument displace the purpose.

In the Kejriwal case: Suryakant asked 'did the CBI follow procedure?' Bhuyan asked 'is the process being used as punishment?' Different questions. Different courts.

In the Assam case: Suryakant asked 'is this the right forum?' Bhuyan asked 'has a constitutional duty to protect a minority community been violated?' Different questions. Different courts.

In the Vanashakti case: Suryakant asked 'do the grounds for review exist?' Bhuyan asked 'does this serve the protective purpose of environmental law?' Different questions. Different courts.

The pattern is not coincidental. It is consistent. Across three cases, across two years, on the same bench — one judge consistently asks the procedural question and one consistently asks the purposive one. That consistency is not a difference of legal philosophy that reasonable people can disagree about. It is a documented pattern of judicial orientation — one that, in every instance, produces outcomes that favour state power over the citizen, procedure over protection, and the form of justice over its substance.

This is what the Vedantic tradition calls avidya. Not the absence of knowledge. The forgetting of purpose. The veil over first principles.

A judge who knows all the rules but has forgotten what they are for is more dangerous than a judge who knows no rules at all. The former wears the robes of justice while its substance has departed. The latter, at least, makes no such claim.

IV. What It Means to the Common Man

This is not an abstract philosophical question. It has immediate, concrete, human consequences. Let us examine what the Bhuyan-Suryakant disagreement means for the ordinary Indian citizen — at four levels.

The Practical Level: Justice as Lottery

When two judges on the same bench disagree not on the weight of evidence but on what justice is for, the common man has no way of knowing which judge he will get. His fundamental rights — to bail, to a fair hearing, to protection from communal violence, to a neutral forum — become a lottery. The Constitution guarantees these rights in absolute terms. But if their enforcement depends on which judge happens to sit on his bench on a given day, they are not rights at all. They are privileges — distributed by chance or by power.

Umar Khalid spent more than five years in jail under UAPA without charges being framed. Arvind Kejriwal spent months in jail on the basis of an investigation a trial court subsequently found was 'predetermined' and 'fragile.' The Muslim community in Assam was told to seek protection from the court of the Chief Minister who had posted a video targeting them.

In each case, the outcome depended not on what the Constitution says — which is clear and unambiguous — but on who was sitting on the bench. That is not justice. That is fortune. And a system that delivers justice by fortune has forgotten what justice means.

The Constitutional Level: Article 32 Hollowed Out

Dr. B.R. Ambedkar called Article 32 — the right of every citizen to approach the Supreme Court directly for the enforcement of fundamental rights — 'the very soul of the Constitution and the most essential of all.' He made it unamendable. He did this because he understood that a right without a reliable remedy is not a right.

When the Supreme Court tells petitioners seeking protection for a threatened minority community 'this is not the right forum, go to the High Court' — while simultaneously pulling jurisdiction upward from four opposition-state High Courts in the same weeks — Article 32 has been quietly hollowed out. Not by Parliament. Not by constitutional amendment. By the selective application of judicial restraint — restrained when the citizen needs protection, expansive when power needs reinforcement.

Ambedkar feared exactly this. He did not make Article 32 unamendable because he feared Parliament would abolish it. He made it unamendable because he understood that rights can be emptied of meaning without being formally abolished — through the slow, procedural, unremarkable accumulation of decisions that find reasons not to act. That is what avidya looks like in constitutional practice.

The Democratic Level: The Last Neutral Institution

Democracy rests on three pillars — legislature, executive, judiciary. The legislature and executive are explicitly political. They represent interests, exercise power, and are expected to be held accountable through elections. The judiciary is the one institution the common man is supposed to be able to trust as standing above that. Not because judges are superhuman, but because the Constitution has designed them to be insulated from political pressure — through security of tenure, through collegium appointments, through the contempt power that protects the court's dignity.

When the judiciary's purpose becomes contested — when two judges on the same bench cannot agree on whether it exists to protect the citizen from the state or to manage the orderly exercise of state power — the common man has lost his last neutral institution. He has nowhere left to go. And a citizen with nowhere left to go is not a free citizen. He is a subject.

This is not hyperbole. It is the logical consequence of what the documented pattern reveals. When the court that was designed as the citizen's last refuge begins, consistently and structurally, to find procedural reasons not to protect him — the refuge has become a closed door. And a closed door, as the first article in this series argued, means the court is not above politics. It is under siege by it.

The Civilisational Level: The Betrayal of Trust

Gandhi understood that the most dangerous moment in any society is not when the powerful become openly oppressive — that is visible, nameable, and can be resisted. The most dangerous moment is when the institutions designed to protect the citizen from oppression begin to serve the oppressor — quietly, procedurally, in the language of rules and precedent. Because then the citizen is not just unprotected. He is deceived. Told that the institution is his guardian while it is being used against him.

The common man who trusts the Supreme Court absolutely — who believes his fundamental rights are safe because the court exists — has placed his freedom in the hands of an institution he has never examined, whose workings he does not understand, whose philosophical disagreements he has never heard of. He has outsourced his freedom. And outsourced freedom, Gandhi told us, is not freedom. It is a comfortable illusion that lasts only until the institution that holds it decides to use it differently.

When Justice Bhuyan wrote 'procedure triumphing the cause of justice,' he was writing not just about one case, and not just about one colleague. He was describing the precise mechanism by which an institution can betray the citizen while appearing, in every technical sense, to serve him. The procedure is followed. The rules are applied. The judgment is written in correct legal language. And justice — the purpose for which all of it exists — quietly departs.

The most dangerous deception is not the lie that is told. It is the truth that is applied in the service of a different purpose — correct in every particular, false in its entirety.

V. Avidya in Both Directions

We have spoken of the judge's avidya — the forgetting of the purpose of justice by one who holds its instruments. But the Vedantic tradition reminds us that avidya is never confined to one person or one institution. Where one forgets, all who depend on the one who forgot must examine their own forgetting.

The common citizen of India has, for decades, maintained a form of avidya of his own. He has forgotten — or perhaps never fully learned — that justice is not a service delivered to him by an institution. It is his own inheritance. His fundamental rights are not gifts from the Constitution — they are his birthright as a citizen, held in trust by the court, enforceable by him, dependent ultimately on his own vigilance and understanding.

The citizen who does not know what Article 32 means cannot defend it when it is quietly emptied. The citizen who does not know the difference between a purposive and a procedural question cannot recognise when his judge has forgotten the purpose. The citizen who has never read a Supreme Court judgment cannot tell the difference between Justice Bhuyan's constitutional attentiveness and Justice Suryakant's procedural formalism — and therefore cannot hold either to account.

This citizen — educated, perhaps, in many things, but not in the laws that govern him — is as much in the grip of avidya as the judge who has forgotten his purpose. He has forgotten his own. He has outsourced the protection of his freedom to an institution he trusts without understanding — and trust without understanding is not wisdom. It is vulnerability.

Gandhi saw this clearly. The British colonial system persisted not merely because the British were powerful — they were — but because Indians had been taught to see themselves as dependent. To believe that governance, justice, and law were things that happened to them, administered by others, beyond their competence to understand or their right to question. The entire apparatus of colonial rule rested on this learned helplessness — this cultivated avidya.

Gandhi's answer was not to produce better rulers. It was to produce better citizens. Citizens who understood what salt tax meant and why it was wrong. Citizens who knew their rights not as abstract principles but as lived realities they could name, claim, and defend. Citizens who did not outsource their freedom — who understood that swaraj — self-rule — begins not in Parliament or in courts but in the educated, conscious, sovereign mind of the individual citizen.

Swaraj is not a gift to be received. It is a capacity to be cultivated. The citizen who does not understand the law that governs him has surrendered his swaraj — not to a foreign power, but to his own forgetting.

VI. The Citizen's Swaraj: An Appeal

This article is not addressed to the Supreme Court. The first article in this series addressed the court — in the Gandhian spirit, with sorrow rather than anger, asking it to remember its purpose. That appeal stands. This article is addressed to you — the citizen who is reading this, who perhaps learned for the first time in these pages that two judges on the same bench disagreed about whether imprisoning a person for 22 months on a predetermined investigation was just, or that the same court that dismissed a petition to protect a threatened minority community was simultaneously directing four opposition-state High Courts to stand down.

If you learned these things here — if this was the first time you heard the names Article 32, or the precautionary principle, or the difference between a purposive and a procedural question — then this article has already served its purpose. Because knowledge is the beginning of swaraj.

The appeal is simple. It has three parts.

First: Educate Yourself About the Law That Governs You

The Constitution of India is not a document for lawyers. It was written for citizens. Dr. Ambedkar spent years making it readable, making its principles clear, making its protections accessible. Article 14 — equality before law. Article 19 — freedom of speech and expression. Article 21 — the right to life and personal liberty, which the courts have expanded to encompass dignity, health, education, and livelihood. Article 32 — the right to approach the Supreme Court directly when any of these are violated.

You do not need a law degree to understand these. You need only the willingness to read — and the understanding that these are your rights, not the court's gift. The court is the trustee. You are the owner. A trustee who mismanages your property can be questioned — but only if you know what your property is.

Second: Watch the Court — Not Just Its Verdicts, But Its Reasoning

The Supreme Court of India publishes its judgments. They are public documents. They are the record of how the court thinks — what questions it asks, what questions it does not ask, whose suffering it considers worthy of urgency and whose suffering it does not.

Justice Bhuyan's dissents are publicly available. His words — 'procedure triumphing the cause of justice,' his insistence that constitutional office holders must not target communities on religious grounds, his warning that process must not become punishment — are in the public record. So are Justice Suryakant's majority judgments. Read both. Compare them. Ask yourself: which judge is answering the question that the Constitution puts before the court? Which is answering a different question?

Justice Bhuyan himself — in the Wikipedia/Wikimedia case — affirmed your right to do exactly this. He quoted Jeremy Bentham: 'Publicity about courtroom proceedings keeps the judge himself, while trying, under trial.' The judge said it himself. The citizen who watches the court keeps it honest. The citizen who does not watch — who outsources — releases it from accountability.

Third: Speak — In the Gandhian Spirit

Gandhi's most powerful tool was not the law. It was truth-telling — documented, nonviolent, persistent, grounded in verifiable fact. He did not make accusations he could not support. He documented what the system did and asked: how do you explain this? He trusted the truth to make its own argument — and it did.

You have the same tool. This article is an example of it — a citizen, not a lawyer, not a politician, not a journalist — examining the public record, documenting what the court has done, and asking the question that the facts compel: how do you explain this pattern?

Speak about what you find. Write about it. Share it. Ask your representatives — in Parliament, in state legislatures — what they intend to do when the institution designed to protect citizens appears, in a documented pattern, to be protecting power instead. Demand that bar councils, retired judges, law faculties, and legal journalists examine the record and speak to it.

Gandhi did not free India alone. He created the conditions in which millions of citizens remembered their own power simultaneously. The Supreme Court can be reminded of its purpose — but only by citizens who have first remembered theirs.

VII. Closing: The Reminder

We began with the Vedantic concept of avidya — forgetting one's essential nature. We have traced it through three judicial disagreements, through the consequences for the common man, and through the citizen's own share of the forgetting.

We close with the reminder that the Vedantic tradition pairs with avidya. The remedy for avidya is not punishment. It is not accusation. It is not the replacement of the one who forgot with someone else who may forget differently. The remedy for avidya is vidya — remembering. The return to first principles. The recollection of essential nature.

For the court, vidya is the memory of what Article 32 was written to do — to make the Supreme Court the last door that stays open when all others close. Not to those who are powerful. Not to those whose suffering carries institutional prestige. To the citizen. Every citizen. Equally.

For the citizen, vidya is the memory of what the Constitution gave him — not as a document held by lawyers and interpreted by judges, but as a living promise made to him personally, enforceable by him directly, dependent on his understanding and his vigilance. The Constitution is not above you. It is yours.

Gandhi carried salt to the sea not because salt was the point — but because the act of carrying it reminded millions of citizens that the empire's claim over their most basic resources was illegitimate, and that their own power to resist was real and immediate. The salt was a reminder. This article is a reminder.

The Supreme Court of India was built to protect you. It was built by people who had seen what power without judicial accountability looks like — who had lived under it, suffered under it, and resolved that independent India would not reproduce it. Dr. Ambedkar, who knew better than anyone what it meant to be without legal protection, made Article 32 unamendable so that you could never be stripped of your last refuge by a majority vote.

He could not have anticipated that the refuge might be quietly emptied from within — through the slow procedural forgetting of its purpose. But he gave you the tool to respond: the same Article 32 that guarantees your right to approach the court also guarantees your right to demand that the court remember what it is for.

Demand it. Not with anger. With knowledge. With documented truth. In the Gandhian spirit — sorrowful, persistent, nonviolent, and absolutely certain that an institution that has forgotten its purpose can, if the citizen remembers his, be reminded.

When a court questions the motives of those who seek protection for the vulnerable, but not the motives of those who threaten them, it has not remained above politics. It has chosen a side — quietly, in the language of procedure. That is the most dangerous kind of choosing.But the citizen who does not know this has chosen too — quietly, in the language of trust. That is the most preventable kind of loss.

A Note on Sources and Method

Every factual claim in this article rests on publicly available judgments, reported court proceedings, and documented news reports. The judgments of Justice Bhuyan cited here — his concurring judgment in the Kejriwal CBI arrest case, his observations in the Assam gun video hearing, his dissent in the Vanashakti environmental case — are on the public record of the Supreme Court of India.

This article makes no allegation of corruption against any judge. It makes no claim of conscious bias or bad faith. It documents a pattern of judicial reasoning across three cases — using the judges' own published words — and asks the reader to examine that pattern and draw their own conclusions.

Where cases were found that complicated or partially contradicted the pattern — as in this article's predecessor — they have been included and honestly examined. A citizen's inquiry that selects only confirming evidence is advocacy, not examination. We have attempted an examination.

Justice Bhuyan, in the Wikipedia/Wikimedia case decided with Justice Oka, affirmed that 'every important issue needs to be vigorously debated by the people and the press, even if the issue of debate is sub judice before a court' — and quoted Bentham's reminder that publicity keeps the judge under trial. We have taken him at his word. We have kept the court under trial — not with accusations, but with its own record.

The first article in this series is available at: https://opensaurabh.blogspot.com/2026/02/when-court-closes-its-doors-citizens.html