The Delhi High Court delivered a scathing rebuke to the Delhi government and Delhi Police on Tuesday, branding their repeated failure to secure judicial officers across the capital as nothing short of an "insensitive" assault on judicial independence, and this time, the Court refused to let bureaucratic inaction slide, rejecting the minutes of a high-level security meeting outright and mandating a fresh, results-oriented conference within seven days.
The broadside came during the hearing of a petition by the Judicial Service Association of Delhi, which demanded the deployment of Personal Security Officers and upgraded residential security for judges, a demand made all the more urgent by a ground reality where Delhi judges travel unguarded in private vehicles and have faced stalking, verbal abuse, and direct threats. Senior Advocate Kirti Uppal placed on record that Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, and Gujarat already extend such protections to their judicial officers, exposing Delhi's glaring inaction.
While Delhi Police's Standing Counsel Sanjay Lao pointed to correspondence between the Union Ministry of Home Affairs and the Registrar General regarding data collection on judges' residential arrangements, the Court found this wholly inadequate, made worse by the discovery that the Principal Secretary of the Department of Law, Justice and Legislative Affairs had not even been invited to the prior meeting held on April 13, laying bare the casual indifference with which authorities had treated the matter.
Justice Manoj Jain stripped away every official justification with precision, dismissing the financial burden argument as absurd and the administration's selective security logic, covering only judges exercising criminal jurisdiction, as entirely unacceptable. The Court's contempt for the wait-and-watch approach of the authorities was unmistakable, "You want someone to be first threatened, assaulted, only then you will come to the rescue? You don't want to create an atmosphere where they can freely roam on the roads."
Refusing to place the April 13 meeting minutes on record, the bench directed all relevant stakeholders to convene a fresh meeting within seven days and return to court on May 12 with concrete, workable proposals for judicial security.
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