Judicial Officers held hostage during Electoral Duty: CJI's unambiguous message to West Bengal, "An Assault on its Judges is an Assault on the Court itself"

In an extraordinary emergency hearing convened without prior listing, a Supreme Court bench led by Chief Justice of India Surya Kant, alongside Justice Joymalya Bagchi and Justice Vipul Pancholi, on Thursday took severe cognisance of a deeply alarming incident in Malda district, West Bengal, where seven judicial officers, including three women, performing court-mandated Special Intensive Revision duties were surrounded, held against their will for nearly nine hours by a mob, denied food and water, and subsequently subjected to stone-pelting and bamboo stick attacks on their vehicles while being evacuated past midnight, an incident the Court characterised as a direct assault on the authority of the Supreme Court itself.

The crisis unfolded on Wednesday afternoon when judicial officers engaged in adjudicating electoral objections under the SIR process, a mechanism established pursuant to Supreme Court directions, were gheraoed by demonstrators in a Malda village from approximately 3:30 PM onwards. Despite repeated requests from the Registrar General of the Calcutta High Court to the State administration for intervention, no meaningful response came for over five hours, with neither the District Collector nor senior police officials arriving at the scene. Food and water were withheld from the stranded officers throughout.

It was only after the Chief Justice of the Calcutta High Court personally telephoned the Home Secretary and senior State officials late at night, and the CJI issued urgent verbal directions past 11 PM, that the officers were finally released after midnight, at which point their convoy was attacked by the waiting mob. The Chief Secretary of West Bengal remained entirely unreachable throughout the crisis, drawing the Supreme Court's sharpest condemnation at the hearing, where the State's counsel described the protest as "apolitical," a characterisation the CJI immediately and pointedly rejected by questioning why no political leader had intervened to restore order during the nine-hour standoff.

The bench pulled no punches in its assessment, recording in its order that the incident bore all the hallmarks of a "calculated and deliberate move to demoralise judicial officers and obstruct the ongoing process of adjudication of claims in the electoral process," and that the conduct of the Chief Secretary, Director General of Police, District Magistrate, and Senior Superintendent of Police was "highly deplorable", officials to whom the Court directed show-cause notices, requiring their personal online presence on April 6 at 4 PM to explain their inaction. Dismissing the State's plea to soften the order's language, the CJI made his personal frustration unmistakably clear, telling the West Bengal Advocate General, "Unfortunately, in your state, each one of you speak political language, we have never seen such a polarised state, that even in compliance of court orders, politics is reflected." 

By way of operative directions, the Court ordered the Election Commission of India to immediately requisition and deploy Central Forces at all venues where judicial officers are conducting SIR adjudications, directed threat assessments for officers with family security concerns, capped public entry at adjudication premises to three to five persons at any time, and, most significantly, directed the ECI to entrust investigation of the Malda attack to an independent central agency, either the CBI or the NIA.