Punishing Dissent Is Misuse of Power, Says Supreme Court Judge

A sitting judge of the Supreme Court has mounted a forceful defence of dissent at a moment when the country is fiercely debating "dimagi naxals", dissent and the health of its democracy, telling a hall of graduating law students that the state cannot punish a citizen for the act of asking a question.

Justice Ujjal Bhuyan, delivering the convocation address at the 13th convocation of the postgraduate programmes of National Law University (NLU), Delhi, on Sunday, framed the freedom to question and to disagree as a constitutional entitlement, not a privilege that those in authority may withdraw at will.

"When students express a different point of view, when students ask questions, they cannot be threatened with punitive action," he said. "That is unconstitutional. That is misuse of power and office."

The words carried unmistakable weight, arriving in the middle of a national argument over how far student protests may go and how the institutions of the state should respond when young people challenge those in power.

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'The right to question is not an act of defiance'

At the core of Justice Ujjal Bhuyan's address lay a single proposition: that a democracy is measured not by the sameness of its citizens but by its capacity to hold disagreement without punishing it. Dissent, in his telling, is not a disturbance to be managed but a feature of freedom that the Constitution actively protects.

"In a democracy, the right to question is not an act of defiance," he said. "It is an essential expression of citizenship, liberty and constitutional responsibility."

A democratic society, he argued, "cannot be built on the edifice that everyone will think alike," and differences must be "accommodated within the broader constitutional framework." The space for dissent, he suggested, is precisely what gives every other freedom its meaning; the liberty to speak or to take part in public life rings hollow if disagreement invites retribution.

"A democracy becomes meaningful not when everyone speaks the same language of thought but when different voices can co-exist, be heard and be treated with dignity," he said.

He was careful to add that asking a question is only a beginning. What matters as much, he said, is the willingness to sit with an answer that unsettles you. A healthy academic culture does not demand that everyone arrive at the same conclusion; it allows views to be expressed, examined and debated. It is better, he observed, borrowing from the essayist Joseph Joubert, to debate a question without settling it than to settle it without a debate.

For a graduating class about to enter the legal profession, the charge was direct. The most valuable thing a legal education can offer, he said, is not the ability to memorise the law but the courage to question established assumptions and to ask whether the law, in a given application, has genuinely served the cause of justice. Tolerating dissent, on this reading, is the beginning of good lawyering, not a threat to it.

The student protests that frame his words

Justice Bhuyan named no institution and no individual. Yet his address followed, by only days, one of the sharpest recent confrontations between law students and the legal establishment.

Earlier this month, more than 450 students of the National Academy of Legal Studies and Research (NALSAR) in Hyderabad objected to a proposal to invite the Chief Justice of India, Surya Kant, as chief guest at their convocation, pointing to his remarks in court on the Delhi student protests. The Bar Council of India (BCI), the statutory regulator of the legal profession, responded by directing state bar councils not to enrol NALSAR's 2026 graduating batch as advocates until the university identified who had organised the campaign.

The order effectively threatened to shut an entire cohort out of the profession over an act of protest, and the backlash was immediate. Within hours the BCI modified its direction, conceding that the "vast majority" of the students were innocent.

Tellingly, it was a Supreme Court bench led by CJI Surya Kant himself that rebuked the regulator, affirming that students have a right to protest and directing that no punitive action be taken against the students or faculty. "It's a dialogue between students and me. Who are they to interfere? This is totally uncalled for," the Chief Justice said.

That flashpoint belongs to a wider season of student protests. Since June, demonstrations have spread across the country over a series of examination paper leaks, with the online collective Cockroach Janta Party calling on people to mobilise and protesters demanding the resignation of the then Union Education Minister, Dharmendra Pradhan. A march towards Parliament on 20 July ended in violent clashes between the police and the protesters at Jantar Mantar with the police being blamed for the excessive use of lathi charge, tear gas and pellet guns. It is against this backdrop of student protests, institutional pushback and hard questions about the state's response that Justice Ujjal Bhuyan chose to speak about dissent.

Intolerance as 'a form of violence'

If the defence of dissent formed the spine of the speech, its most arresting line was a warning about intolerance.

India, Justice Ujjal Bhuyan said, is "the land of Buddha and Gandhi," a country of peace and tolerance with "no place for violence." An intolerant mind, he cautioned, is "at odds with the spirit of the Constitution" and amounts to "a manifestation of another form of violence."

He then drew a straight line from intolerance to the silencing of dissent. "Our constitution protects the freedom to speak, to think, and to believe differently," he said. "Intolerance begins to undermine that framework when disagreement or dissent is no longer treated as a legitimate difference of opinion but as something that must be silenced, rejected or punished."

Tolerance, he insisted, is not a question of manners but a constitutional value. To press the point he reached back four decades to Justice O. Chinnappa Reddy's judgment in the 1986 Bijoe Emmanuel case, quoting: "Our tradition teaches tolerance, our philosophy preaches tolerance, our Constitution practices tolerance; let us not dilute it." He added that words relevant then were "even more relevant today."

The maturity of a democracy, he said, is revealed not in how it treats opinions that carry the majoritarian approval but in how it responds to those that are "difficult, unpopular or sometimes very inconvenient."

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Why a judge's words matter now

Coming from within the judiciary, the intervention carries weight. Justice Ujjal Bhuyan has become one of the more independent voices on the Supreme Court. He has spoken out against extra-legal "bulldozer" demolitions as incompatible with the rule of law, and has publicly questioned the opacity of collegium resolutions that record no reasons for judicial appointments. There is, too, a pointed resonance in his choice of subject: as Chief Justice of the Telangana High Court, he served until his elevation as Chancellor of NALSAR, the very university now at the centre of the enrolment dispute.

Justice Ujjal Bhuyan's remarks reinforce, from the bench, the principle the Supreme Court had already asserted in the NALSAR matter, that peaceful protest and disagreement cannot invite professional or institutional punishment. But they also make plain that the judiciary is not of one mind about how student protests and dissent should be handled, and that senior judges are prepared to say so in public, even when the dissent runs close to their own institution.

The intervention also speaks to a broader unease about academic freedom. Universities have increasingly become the places where the state's appetite for disagreement is tested, from campus demonstrations to disputes over who may be invited to speak and who may not. By locating the defence of dissent inside the university itself, and insisting that the habit of thinking freely "has to begin from the universities," Justice Bhuyan tied an abstract constitutional principle to the concrete institutions where young Indians first learn to argue, to organise and to object.