Judging Language

A new study examining 75 years of constitutional bench verdicts has opened an uncomfortable but necessary conversation: India’s highest court, even while expanding constitutional protections for Dalits, has often spoken in ways that perpetuate the very hierarchies it seeks to dismantle. It is a paradox that sits at the heart of India’s democratic journey ~ progressive outcomes expressed through regressive vocabulary, and justice articulated in idioms that still carry the scent of caste.

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The University of Melbourne-funded study, conducted in partnership with the Court itself, does not accuse judges of malice.

Instead, it exposes an institutional blind spot shaped by decades of limited diversity on the bench. With only a handful of Dalit judges serving in the Court's history, the judicial imagination has been overwhelmingly shaped by those who have never lived the experience of caste discrimination. In such a landscape, metaphors and analogies that appear harmless to those drafting judgments can carry profound insult for those whom the judgments concern.