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When I went to Mumbai last fall, I wanted to visit one place in particular, Bombay High Court. I went with my producer, Krista, early in the morning. It's almost like, how would you describe that? It's just all of these beautiful vines and trees and flowers.
This place is at the center of this last portion of Judge Louis's story. It's where in 2018 two key petitions were filed, urging the court to investigate the judge's death. But it's also where many everyday Indians go to seek justice. The only higher court in India is the Supreme Court.
Standing in front of the Gothic facade, the morning light gives it a grandeur. The size, the stonework, it has the gravitas of a strong institution. But as the day went on, I wondered if the architecture was nothing more than a convincing set piece. So we walk around a little bit more and see what else we can see. After admiring the building, we ducked into a coffee house nearby. The day was already sweltering at 8.30 in the morning and the coffee house was a haven of air conditioning.
Lures and crisp white shirts and black slacks were huddled around tables pouring over case files. Krista and I had just ordered coffee when an attorney nearby called us over. He pulled his court notes from his leather briefcase and laid them out across the table. I was excited and English copy of a book on negotiating tips. I began breaking the ice by mentioning my long unused law degree and shared a bit about what we were working on.
He then laid out a series of handwritten notes walking us through each of the cases he was set to argue that day. When I started asking him about how he felt about the Indian justice system, he invited us to his office to talk in private. We were intrigued so we followed. When we sat down in his office, it quickly became clear that like so many people I spoke to for this story, he had a lot to say. But he absolutely did not want anything attributed to him.
Krista and I debriefed the conversation once we left the office. I asked him about his experience as a Muslim advocates and whether things are getting harder and you could see how sad he became. His expression and body language were so dejected, it felt like I had a brief window into something very private. He looked almost like he was going to cry and then he said he just nodded, it's like basically acknowledging that of course things have gotten a lot harder for Muslims.
He also said something in that conversation I've returned to again and again in the months since. He also mentioned corruption like that, it's I think the way he described it is that it's like the air you breathe. He definitely acknowledged that corruption is like a standard part of the criminal justice system here in India. This climate of corruption hangs over this entire story. Of course, corruption happens in a lot of places, including in the US.
But it's not something you expect on every level of bureaucracy. It's not normalized. Combine that with how slowly the judicial system moves and it's easy to see how even when things end up in court, there's no guarantee justice will be done. I saw this first hand later that trip when I visited a court in Varanasi where hundreds of families and their lawyers waited in open their stalls with no clear sense of when their cases would be heard.
Litigants show up day after day waiting for their case, often for years going without income. According to the New York Times, there are 50 million cases pending across India at the current rate that would take 300 years to clear. Recently, a bank liquidation case was settled after 72 years of litigation. But not everyone has to wait so long for a verdict. Especially if you're on it shut, the Prime Minister's right hand man. I'm Ravi Gupta and this is Killing Justice, episode 6 of Fars.
Judge Lawy's death was both an ending and a beginning. It was the end of a man's life. A man who seemed to be devoted to the idea of justice, but was also the beginning of a saga that wound all the way up to the Supreme Court. In this episode, I'm going to trace how that court's decisions have pushed and pulled the unfolding action from the very start, and brought us to a conclusion that makes India's justice system look more like an instrument of injustice.
But let's rewind to the other legal saga that features prominently in this story, the case that Judge Lawy had been tasked with hearing. The one where Amit Shah had been charged with the murder of an alleged gangster, Sauriddin Sheikh. Once Modi and the BJP came to power, Shah's case sped through the justice system. This might seem a little in the weeds, but stick with me for this. It's important to follow. In 2012, Shah's case landed in front of a judge. Judge Utpat and Mumbai.
He oversaw the case for two years, until just a few weeks after the BJP was elected in May 2014. The next month, Utpat was transferred, and that's when Judge Lawy had took over. Lawy had started reviewing the case in the summer, and still hadn't made a ruling by the time he died in November. In fact, Shah hadn't even appeared in front of the court at that point.
So when a third judge was assigned after Judge Lawy's death, it would be reasonable to assume that he would also need a few months to review the mountain of case files. But he didn't. Judge Envy Gassavi ruled on the case within just a few weeks, without ever requiring Shah to appear in court. In less than a month, all of the charges against Amit Shah had been discharged.
In a country where justice can ooze along at a snail's pace, Shah was able to wash his hands of any litigation in less than a year once the BJP was in power. And it's not the only ruling that moved surprisingly quickly. Fast forward to 2017, Judge Lawy's death had become news, thanks to the caravan, and plenty of people wanted to know if there might be something nefarious about his death. So a few intrepid litigators started a new fight in the courts.
These petitions were also addressed with a swiftness, uncharacteristic of the Indian justice system. We took initiative, because it's a question of rule of law. This is Amit Abdi. If judges are not secured in a country, what about the common man? Amit is the president of the Bombay Lawyers Association, or BLA. These are some of the people who knew Judge Lawy of Best, members of the Bombay Bar. And they were disappointed to see that the caravan articles didn't prompt a government inquiry.
It needs to be investigated thoroughly, and if there is some foul play, we should come to light with the public. That's why they petition the court for an independent investigation into Judge Lawy's death. What is the truth about this death? That is what we want. The BLA's petition was actually one of five originating around the country, all asking for the same thing, an independent investigation.
The five suits were rolled into one, and within just a month the case was assigned to a bench of three Supreme Court judges. Meanwhile, something else was playing out behind closed doors, and it would culminate in four Supreme Court justices making an unprecedented move. They called the press conference. That was a huge thing. This has never happened in the past.
Report from the Rangin Talkley, remember as being in Delhi in January of 2018, catching up with an old colleague in a restaurant when they received a breaking news alert. And we were, I think, having breakfast. And she got a message on her phone. The four Supreme Court justices already were live on the press conference. To anyone paying attention, this was shocking. In India, judges are discouraged from speaking to the press. This is an unprecedented thing that is happening.
Niranjan remembers immediately leaving the restaurant with his colleague, rushing to try to find somewhere they could watch the news. Then we went to a cafe nearby, a cyber cafe, and we started watching it. They settled in to watch the live coverage. Today, you can find the whole press conference on YouTube. The justices are gathered in front of the most senior judges' house, four old men sitting on the lawn in comfortable chairs.
The reserved, speaking calmly, stark contrast to the noisy cameras and crush of reporters. The most senior justice, Justice Chalamishwar, addresses the crowd. The administration of the Supreme Court is not in our debt. It's hard to hear, but he says, the administration of the Supreme Court is not in order. They called the press conference because they just had an unusual meeting with the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Deepak Mishra.
They had taken an issue with the way he had assigned judges to a case. It wasn't immediately clear to me why this detail about case assignment ended up causing such a firestorm. So I reached out to legal expert Alok Prasana Kumar, who co-founded the Vitti Center for Legal Policy. And he explained why bench selection could be so controversial. There are, as of today, 34 judges of the Indian Supreme Court. He says that the Chief Justice is in charge of assigning those 33 other judges to cases.
But sometimes there are exceptions. Occasionally, the Chief Justice will assemble a special bench for a case and include himself. This is where controversy has erupted a lot. A case is considered quote unquote important. And the Chief Justice says, I will hear the case. Or the bench that I am sitting in, a spark of I will hear the case. That's what happened with the petitions for an investigation into Judge Lawy's death. The Chief Justice had assembled a special bench.
The four judges who called the press conference believe the Chief was using his powers to tilt the balance of key decisions. By assigning his preferred judges to the most sensitive cases. And by doing that, they feared the Chief Justice was compromising the independence of the judiciary. That's what pushed these four justices to make a public statement about the state of their institution. The hallmark of a good democracy is an independent and impartial case.
The hallmark of a good democracy is an independent and impartial judge. It wasn't just a press conference, it was a call to action. And the Indian press pounced. What we have just witnessed is a historic event in Indian judiciary and also in the crucified democracy. During my reporting, whenever I spoke to people about the lawyer case, this is the moment people often remembered. They immediately asked, did you watch the judges press conference? That's never happened before.
For the judges to break protocol and speak out like that, they must have been desperate. They wanted their names on the record against what they viewed as an unprecedented decline of their institution. I don't want another 20 years later. It's hard to make out, but he's saying that the group didn't want anyone 20 years down the road to say they sold their souls.
The judges don't mention the lawyer by name, but the timing of this, the day of the hearing around the two petitions, the fact that they mentioned speaking to Chief Justice Mishraha that morning, reporters had a theory. But today morning, what do you think? Is there any specific issue? Is it just a lawyer? It is an issue of assignment of a case, which is an issue raised in that letter. So what's that? This is about lawyers. There's no legal information. There's no legal information.
There's no legal information. Niranjoon was watching all of this live from an internet cafe and he was convinced that the lawyer case had played a role. And I started shouting, so I was elated. Niranjoon hoped his reporting would encourage members of the judiciary to support the need for an investigation into lawyer's death. The lawyer was, after all, a judge himself. Now, with four Supreme Court justices speaking out, Nauronjan felt something had fundamentally changed.
So it means that now, at least, the actor can reach its logical aid, and I was feeling very happy about it. But even though that press conference made national news, it didn't change what had already been set in motion. The same bench the Chief Justice originally selected plowed forward. Hearings began in early 2018. A tool dev is the journalist I met in New York City. He was covering the hearings for the caravan. I had been there on every single day of the lawyer hearings.
I sat to the entire court proceedings. A tool says he watched from a press box from the Chief Justice of India, or CJI's courtroom. The hearing is going on in CJI's courtroom, which is directly under the dome of the Supreme Court. The purpose of these hearings was simply for the court to decide whether they should compel an official investigation into Judge Law's death. Until this point, the only information that had come out was from the news reports.
With these hearings, a tool in the rest of the public had a chance to understand what the Maharashtra government said had happened in detail. And that came in the form of a pile of paperwork. So the government of Maharashtra presented a 60-page dossier. This dossier, a tool is talking about, its evidence gathered by the police and intelligence unit of the Maharashtra government.
It wasn't a full investigation, just a handful of selected interviews and statements that sometimes contradicted each other. But it did contain something that turned the caravan's narrative upside down. New accounts from the lawyer family. In these letters, the family backtracked on their suspicions around the Judge's death. When the Maharashtra SID presented retractions from the lawyer family, the whole thing stuck to many of the people we talked to. Including a tool dev, the caravan reporter.
All I have is a statement from somebody who is absolutely unreachable to everyone except for the government. Published reports said that the family was in Communicado for about a week after the caravan articles were published. According to a tools reporting, that's exactly when the Maharashtra SID produced statements from the family that retracted what they had told the caravan. We attempted to interview members of the lawyer family for months in the lead up to the release
of the series. After the first two episodes of the show were published, we received a letter from a Nuzh lawyer, Judge Lawyer's son. In the letter, he told us that anything he had to say in the matter, he had told the Maharashtra state inquiry and the family was fully satisfied after the court scrutiny. This about face and its timing is what's so perplexing to me and certainly to a tool. The thing is, clearly, they had suspicions back in November. If they do not have any suspicion
in January, I would like to know what happened in December. In that Supreme Court could have asked them to testify with it again. Supreme Court could have asked to testify a lot of people. This brings us to a series of decisions the court made that continues to baffle a tool, a loak, and so many other observers we talk to. You know that moment in every legal movie where
people are sworn in? The witness will put their hand on the Bible, razor left hand in the air, and swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? The court just skipped that step because all the statements submitted by the Maharashtra state government were not required to be made under oath. This was shocking to a tool depth, the reporter. I mean, but who has dealt with the legal system knows that this is not how statements are taken.
They have to be on an effidate so that if you're lying, you're perjuring yourself. They're judges. They should know it themselves, but no, there is no effidate. These are things that they have written down on a piece of paper. This is what is produced in the Supreme Court. Not only that, the petitioners were given no chance to cross-examine the witnesses. That meant that the petitioners' lawyers weren't able to question or clarify points made in
the various statements submitted by the state of Maharashtra. The Bombay Lawyers Association actually asked the bench for permission to do this. Here's legal expert, Alok Pursana Kumar. In Hindi, there is a nice phrase for it's called tutu meme, which means yoyo meme. The English equivalent would be he said she said, right? So there will be like, look, there's an opportunity to cross-examine. We'll come out, we'll be able to tell what is the truth of the matter.
But the request to cross-examine witnesses was rejected, which meant that some of the inconsistencies in Maharashtra's dossier were never examined. Like the written statements submitted by the four judges who accompanied Loya that night, it turned out that two of those statements contradicted each other. You might remember that there was controversy around whether Judge Loya received an electrocardiogram or ECG. In a letter submitted to the state of Maharashtra, one of the judges, Judge
Barde, describes Loya receiving an ECG at Dandai Hospital. But another judge, Judge Rathi, wrote in his statement that the ECG was broken. That contradiction has never been reconciled. Contradictions aside, the evidence submitted by Maharashtra state supported the official narrative that Judge Loya died of natural causes. There was one other decision the bench made that clouded the new information in court filings. The court approved a request that all the evidence submitted
by the state of Maharashtra would be held in a sealed cover. There are only a handful of people who have ever had access to all of this material. The three justices hearing the case, the Maharashtra state government's defense council, and the petitioner's lawyers. That's it. Some of those materials, like the statements from Judge Barde and Judge Rathi, were later quoted in court records, so we know what they said. But others, like statements from the Loya family,
appear to have never been made public. Now to me, that is a complete fash of any kind of procedure, because you have two contesting stories here. Legal expert Alok Prasana Kumar says the Supreme Court had an opportunity to establish the facts. They could have said, we feel that before taking this further, we need to establish what really happened. What action that happens afterwards happens afterwards, but we want to first get an idea as to what has actually happened here.
And I think that was allowed to happen here. Alok sees these decisions as a major failing of the Supreme Court. If you as a Supreme Court want to do this exercise without giving the opportunity for one side to cross examine the other without allowing for a full examination of all the evidence without bringing all the material on record without having like some impartial authority overseeing this, feels like you're trying to brush something under the carpet. It feels like you just don't want
to go into it, right? Now there was only one thing left to do, present their ruling. So less than six months after Naurajan publishes first article in the caravan, the Supreme Court published its judgment. Now fresh updates coming in. This is an explosive case. The three judge bench of the Supreme Court heard just a subrige copal, Harkeishan Loya's death case. We know tomorrow morning, clearly both political and judicial implications for this. That's after the break.
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the good times. The Supreme Court had nine hearings on these petitions in early 2018. And by April, they finally made their decision. A tool, the reporter from the caravan remembers what he did when the decision was released. And then I came back to the office. I printed the judgment. I took it home. I sat down with a glass of whiskey and I started going through it. The Supreme Court has just delivered its verdict on the batch of pleas that sought an independent probe into the death
of justice ph. Lawyer. The apex court has in fact dismissed those petitions that sought an independent inquiry. And in a big observation, the Supreme Court said that all documents show that judge lawyer's death was natural. There would be no investigation into the death of judge lawyer. To a tool dev and many others we spoke into, the ruling felt utterly baseless. The Supreme Court
simply decided that the state of Maharashtra's version of events was convincing. The judgment specifically cited the statements from the judges who were with Lawyer the night he died. And the chief justice of India writes in this judgment that I could trust these judgments because and I thought it is a sentence in that judgment you can go read it today. They have a ring of truth. The judgment was written by Justice Tondritute. And it read that the Supreme Court was content to
simply take fellow members of the judiciary at their ward. Now I don't think Deva Chandrachur is a person who can read minds through paper. So whether for him they had a ring of truth or not is absolutely inconsequential. I would like to know why are these things legally some messabel? Why should I believe them? It might have had a ring of truth for Mr. Chandrachur. But like these are not the things that would stand the scrutiny of basic journalistic ethics. We forget law.
Legal observer Alok Prasana Kumar is also unimpressed by the logic of the court in its judgment. The point of this exercise is what is the truth? What is the truth of the matter? And the truth of the matter is established in a manner understood by law. That is what the court has not allowed to go ahead in this case. And that is unfortunately what keeps people sort of saying what really happened with Judge Loya. And that was it. There was and is no other legal recourse to pursue an official
investigation into Judge Loya's death. Even if new evidence were to come up, if there was a sudden appetite for opening the case, now even more time has passed. Memories fade, documents are lost, witnesses pass away, we've seen enough movies to know what time does to evidence. Which is deeply unsatisfying. Because had there been a true investigation back in 2014, we might have a lot more answers. Looking at the way the courts handled these
petitions raises a big question for me. Is the Indian judiciary truly independent? Questions like this are hard to get at, but a look pointing me to a study on corruption in the Indian judiciary. So this is one of those things that is actually measurable. There's a team based in Singapore that published a paper looking at how rulings of Indian Supreme Court judges
are impacted by politics. This is objectively measured data driven study that shows how the prospect of a post-retirement job influences the way a judge decides a case. India's Supreme Court Justice is all retire at 65. They do not have lifetime appointments. And research shows that the possibility of a government job after retirement has a way of driving judicial decisions. So a judge who generally is kind of 50 or 50 on most issues
starts to get more pro-government as their retirement comes in. And most interestingly, they start becoming more pro-government only when they know the government has enough tenure or left to give them a job. And while the study focuses on Supreme Court justices, look says it's hard to imagine that other judges wouldn't feel the same pressures. So who wants a bright? It was a farce. A tool sees the whole saga as a total failure of the system.
I have reported on the constitutional history of India I have profiled three judges, three chief justice of the Supreme Court and profiled the solicitor general of India. I have written a 15,000 word essay on the appointments process and how it was corrupted in the history of independent India at the Supreme Court. And that trial, that hearing was an absolute farce. The question I'm left asking is, what happens to a democracy when the system in place to establish
truth stops working? In our next episode, reporter or tool Dev and I explore why judge lawyer's death was a turning point for India. When it was unfolding, it was shocking in a way that nothing was after it. And at the end of a grueling reporting trip, I could jowl my dad to take me to his ancestral village. So as you head back here, do you think you'll recognize anybody or know anybody in this town anymore? Well, it's going to be very difficult to me, it seems like
because most of the people who are older than me, they apparently have died. Well, let's make it a goal. Let's try to find one person that you know. And I think a bonus would be one person who's ever met your father. And we find so much more than I ever expected. Killing justice is an original podcast from crooked media and the branch media. I'm your host, Ravi Gupta. Our executive producers are me, Ravi Gupta, Katie Long, Ben Rhodes, and Alison Falsetta.
With special thanks to Sarah Geismar, Madeline Herringer, and Kate Malikov. Our senior producer is Christopher Ripple and Lacey Roberts is our story editor. Our associate producer is Sydney Rap, fact checking by Amy Tardiff. Sound design and mixing by Sarah Gibbalasca with assistant editing by Natalie Eskudero, an original score by Karim Dwaydi. During this election cycle, we must escape our bubbles and engage the persuadible.
That's what the Lost Debate shows all about. Tasted by me, Ravi Gupta, perform our Obama staffer, turn to school principal, turn to political strategist. At the Lost Debate, we tackle the most divisive issues and difficult issues with nuance and understanding, achieving the seemingly impossible respect from across the political spectrum. So come join the conversation, subscribe to Lost Debate wherever you get your podcasts.