New Delhi: This month, a sessions court in Madhya Pradesh convicted seven men of beating a man to death on a road near Seoni Malwa. The victim was a Muslim cattle transporter. The judgment is careful and reasoned. It convicts on a patiently built chain of evidence, and declines to convict where the proof runs out. In a class of cases where prosecutions routinely collapse, that is unusual work.

Almost no one noticed. The verdict made little national impression, though it was analysed in The Quint. The reason is plain. The judgment was written in Hindi.

That fact is worth sitting with. India’s legal conversation is conducted in English and trained upward. It watches the Supreme Court, reads the High Courts when they speak in English, and pays almost no attention to the trial courts. This is not only habit. Article 348(1)(a) of the Constitution keeps the Supreme Court and the high courts in English.  

Yet for most Indians, and for nearly all poor and marginalised ones, the trial court is the justice system. The Supreme Court is a distant rumour. 

The place where liberty is granted or refused, where a charge becomes a conviction or an acquittal, is a district courtroom working in an Indian language.

We have built machinery to carry the law in one direction only. The Supreme Court now translates its own judgments into the regional languages—tens of thousands of them into Hindi—so that a ruling from Delhi can be read in a district court. The Chief Justice has said that English, in its “legal avatar,” is incomprehensible to almost any citizen, and he is right. The effort to push the apex court’s words downward is admirable.

There is no machinery running the other way. When a trial court in Narmadapuram, Nagpur or Madurai writes something significant in Hindi, Marathi or Tamil, nothing carries it up into the national conversation. It surfaces only if a journalist or a lawyer happens to translate it privately, as I did in this case. 

The state has spent real effort making the Supreme Court legible to the districts. It has spent none making the districts legible to the rest of us.

Ignoring Lower Courts

This blindness has a cost, and the cost falls first on accountability. We do notice trial courts, but almost only when they fail. We mark the reflexive remand, the bail denied for years, the conviction later found false, the prejudiced aside from the bench. That scrutiny is necessary, and it should grow. But a judiciary watched only for its errors is half seen. 

We have built no habit of noticing the district judge who got a hard case right, under pressure, with a weak investigation and frightened witnesses, and who refused the easy path. Accountability that records only failure is not accountability. It is a standing indictment with no controls.

Lynching trials are where this matters most. They are the cases that most often fall apart. Witnesses turn hostile, investigations are thin, and acquittals follow. When a court convicts in such a case on evidence it has tested rather than assumed, and stops where the proof stops, it is doing the quiet, difficult work that the rule of law is actually made of. To pass over that in silence, because it happened in Hindi in a small town, is to misunderstand where the law lives.

It lives below, not above. The Supreme Court issues the grand directions, on lynching, on arrest, on bail, and we study each one closely. But a direction is only a promise. 

Whether it is kept is decided in trial courts, by judges we never read. The Court’s 2018 ruling in Tehseen Poonawalla told governments to protect witnesses and compensate victims of mob violence. Whether any of that happens is settled, case by case, in courtrooms the legal commentariat does not enter. We lavish attention on the instruction and ignore the place where it is obeyed or betrayed.

Consider what a court in Hapur, in Uttar Pradesh, did two years ago. It convicted ten men for the cow-rumour killing of Mohammad Qasim, a goat trader, in 2018. It went further, and recorded that the police had mishandled the investigation, ignoring the very directions the Supreme Court had issued for such cases, directions that existed only because the survivor had once gone to the Supreme Court himself. 

The conviction made the news. The judgment, written in Hindi, was not read. The pattern repeats: the event travels, the reasoning stays behind.

None of this is an argument for celebrating courts. It is an argument for seeing them whole. A bench praised only by flatterers and a bench noticed only for failure are both poorly understood. Crediting good work is not flattery. It is the other half of accountability: the half that signals what the system should want more of, and tells the public that principled judging at the base is real and possible.

Paying Equal Attention

So a few things should change. Legal journalism and scholarship should look down as hard as they look up, and treat the district court as a site of constitutional life, not a waystation on the road to appeal. 

The same will that built the Supreme Court’s translation project could fund a channel running the other way, surfacing and translating significant trial-court judgments in every language. High courts could flag them. Legal-aid authorities, who sit in these courtrooms every day, could document them. 

And those of us who write about the law could learn to mark the judgment that got it right, in the language it was written in, with the care we spend dissecting the one that got it wrong.

We came across the Seoni Malwa judgment by accident while translating it. The unsettling thought is the rest, the good judgments and the bad alike, being written this week in courtrooms we have decided not to look into, in languages we have decided not to read. 

Equal justice under law begins, modestly, with equal attention. We are not yet paying it the attention it deserves.

(V. Venkatesan is a legal journalist and contributing editor at the Supreme Court Observer.)

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