4 min readFeb 13, 2026 07:51 AM IST
First published on: Feb 13, 2026 at 07:38 AM IST
Recent years have seen an evolving trend for every incoming Chief Justice abandoning guidelines issued by outgoing CJIs, destroying institutional identity or consensus on vital issues. The latest example comes from the current CJI, Justice Surya Kant, who discarded the gender glossary published during the tenure of D Y Chandrachud.
Every common law court in the world worth the name issues practice guidelines or restatement of laws, intended to be the distilled wisdom of the Court. This is what the glossary attempted on the vital issue of gender justice. All the entries of the glossary were supported by the evolving wisdom of the Court on gender justice and were an attempt to eliminate gender stereotyping and victim blaming. This is an issue that has plagued the court since the infamous Mathura case, when a 16-year-old Adivasi girl was raped by a constable inside the precincts of a police station, and the Supreme Court (SC) held that she had consented and hence this was not rape.
Speaking at a public meeting recently, the former CJI B R Gavai referred to this judgment as an “institutional failure”. In a recent news report, the survivor herself is reported to have said that 50 years later, the only thing that stayed with her was “humiliation”. It is this type of humiliation that the gender glossary was intended to address. It is this kind of last-mile delivery by magistrates, sessions courts and high courts that the guidelines would have addressed, without driving every aggrieved victim to come to the SC.
The gender glossary was intended to be a guide for individual judges, lawyers, victims and the general public on the use of gender-sensitive language. Language, we must note, is not just about semantics but a carrier of knowledge and values. The gender glossary was a part of an attempt at a gender audit of language as a carrier of discrimination based on sex, prohibited by Article 15. It was intended as a guide to judges across the hierarchy of courts and was a worthy attempt at delivering justice to women. Tragically, it has been discarded without so much as a conversation with the bar or the affected community.
The SC is an institution and not a collection of individual judges with no institutional memory. Practice guidelines provide an institutional memory and a judicial policy on gender justice. After 75 years of the functioning of the courts, we expect to see more and not less of such practice directions. This is one of the reasons why the SC itself has been endowed with the administrative function of making rules.
We now come to the reasons for discarding the glossary. There is no indication why they have been discarded except to say that it was “too technical “and the survivors and their families would not understand it”. All language is value-loaded. That apart, the language of law is nothing but “technical” and the task of the court is to interpret technical language in the light of constitutional principles. So, how does one understand the discarding of the glossary?
The giveaway is in reference to being “Harvard oriented” Is this perhaps an attempt to replace “ Harvard” with “Swadeshi”, part of the official narrative of the state that our laws and language need to be decolonised? English, after all, is the official language of the courts under Article 348(1), and writing Hindi in the Roman script does not make it English. Wisdom must be acquired from anywhere, be it Harvard, Oxford or international treaties and conventions to which India is a party.
At the very least, we expect from our judges some exchange of ideas between outgoing and incoming chief justices to maintain institutional integrity and predictability for the people they serve. It’s not too late. A judicial conclave, a town hall with the bar and the concerned citizens, may produce some inputs for stable gender justice guidelines and for a gender audit of the functioning of our courts.
The writer is a senior advocate, Supreme Court of India
