Sometimes, a judge asks a question that becomes larger than the case before him. This week, the Bombay High Court witnessed one such moment. While setting aside an externment order, Judge S. M. Jamdar from Bombay high court posed a question that has since reverberated across social media and legal circles:
“Why can’t citizens protest government decisions without being made slaves by slapping cases?” Then came the second blow: “You are public servants, not masters.”
The remarks were not a passing judicial observation but amounted to a rare and stinging indictment of a troubling reality increasingly visible across India, the use of police powers and criminal proceedings to wear down, intimidate, and silence citizens who challenge authority. The words have gone viral because they touch a raw nerve.
Millions of Indians today feel that the cost of dissent has become extraordinarily high, because raising questions faces cases, join a protest is charged with detention, criticize a policy and one must prepare for a legal battle: The process itself often becomes the punishment.
A Growing Concern and Worry
India’s Constitution guarantees freedom of speech and the right to assemble peacefully. Yet, over the past decade, there has been growing concern among jurists, civil liberties groups and former judges about the increasing use of criminal law against protesters. The methods vary such as multiple FIRs in different jurisdictions, preventive detention. prohibitory orders, charges relating to unlawful assembly, obstruction, or public disorder and in some cases, externment orders that effectively exile individuals from their homes and communities.
Externment laws were designed to deal with hardened criminals and habitual offenders. Their purpose was to protect society from dangerous elements whose presence posed a genuine threat to public safety.
But civil liberties advocates have repeatedly warned that extraordinary powers, once available, have a tendency to migrate beyond their original purpose.
Justice Jamdar’s order appears to recognise precisely this danger.
His remarks raise a profound constitutional question:
When does the State stop maintaining order and begin policing opinion?
A Pattern That Courts Have Been Warning About
This is not the first time the judiciary has sounded an alarm. The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that dissent is the “safety valve” of democracy and that if this valve is not allowed to function, pressure within society can explode. Various High Courts over the years have criticised the indiscriminate use of criminal law against students, journalists, activists and ordinary citizens participating in protests.
Retired judges, constitutional scholars and former police officers have increasingly voiced concern about what they describe as the “criminalisation of dissent.” The concern is not ideological, but constitutional.
Democracy cannot function if citizens fear that disagreement with government policy may result in years of litigation, police scrutiny, or restrictions on their liberty.
“Made Slaves by Slapping Cases”
Justice Jamdar’s choice of words was extraordinary. Judges generally speak in measured and restrained language. Courts are institutions of precision and caution. That is why his use of the phrase “made slaves” has resonated so powerfully. The statement captures a fear that many citizens quietly express: that legal processes can become instruments of control. A person acquitted after ten years of litigation may still lose employment, savings, peace of mind, and reputation. The punishment often arrives long before any verdict. This phenomenon has a name in legal circles:
Process as punishment.
The case may eventually fail, but the objective of exhaustion may already have been achieved.
A Reminder About Who Owns Power
Perhaps the most important sentence from Justice Jamdar’s observations was this:
“You are public servants—not masters.” Those seven words go to the heart of the Indian republic. The Constitution begins with three powerful words:
“We, the People.”
Not “We, the Government.”; Not “We, the Police.”‘ Not “We, the State.”
The people are sovereign.
Every public institution exists to serve them.
Yet, there are moments in every democracy when those entrusted with power begin to view criticism as defiance and dissent as disorder.
History shows that democracies are rarely destroyed in one dramatic moment. They erode slowly when citizens begin censoring themselves out of fear and when institutions become intolerant of criticism.
Why This Judgment Matters
Justice Jamdar’s remarks arrive at a time when protests, whether by farmers, students, youth groups, environmental activists or policy critics, are increasingly accompanied by legal confrontations. His order therefore goes beyond the fate of one individual as a warning against confusing authority with ownership, against treating citizens as subjects, against using legal mechanisms to create fear, and most importantly, it is a reminder that the State derives its legitimacy from the people and not the other way around.
The judiciary cannot govern the country. That is not its role. But at critical moments, it performs another essential function – it reminds power of its limits. Justice Jamdar’s remarks are one such reminder.
In an age of outrage and polarisation, one sentence from a courtroom has cut through the noise because it speaks to a foundational democratic principle:
Dissent is not disloyalty. Protest is not criminality. And public servants are exactly that – servants of the public, never their masters.
