The FIR Theatre: What CJP Actually Wants From the Supreme Court
Editor-in-Chief of indiacommentary.com. Current Affairs analyst and political commentator. Author of Cyber Scams in India, Digital Arrest, The Money Trap and The Human Hack
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By Sunil Garodia
First publised on 2026-07-29 03:04:46
About the Author
Editor-in-Chief of indiacommentary.com. Current Affairs analyst and political commentator. Author of Cyber Scams in India, Digital Arrest, The Money Trap and The Human Hack
View all posts by this Author
The CJP appears to have discovered a grievance the moment it stopped needing one, and the timing tells you almost everything about what is actually being negotiated.
On Tuesday the Supreme Court did what a constitutional court can be reasonably expected to do when confronted with a settlement it had no part in drafting: it declined to treat a private understanding between the government and a protest outfit as binding on its own docket. The bench directed that no coercive action be taken against protesters without criminal antecedents, ordered the release of minors held in custody, and signalled that it was considering a probe into police excesses at Sansad Marg, all while permitting investigation into the already-registered FIRs to continue. That is not an ambiguous ruling. It is, if anything, the least the Court could have done for the protesters while still doing its job.
CJP's response was to call this "unacceptable." Its spokesperson informed the country that the government must withdraw the FIRs "as promised," and that the party's own demands must be met before it will even entertain what the Supreme Court has ordered on its behalf. Read that sentence again. A litigant is telling the country's apex court that its relief is welcome but conditional, and that the real deal is being cut somewhere else, with someone else. This is not how litigation works. It is how negotiation works, conducted in public, using judicial proceedings as a backdrop rather than a forum.
None of this should surprise anyone who has watched Kapil Sibal organise and fund the actual legal apparatus in parallel. He has not, so far, been shown appearing before the bench for CJP itself, and there is no indication anyone has sought an omnibus stay of every FIR against every protester nationwide. What Sibal has built is a legal aid fund and a tracking mechanism, funded personally with a crore of his own money, designed to connect volunteer lawyers with students facing individual cases. That architecture assumes exactly the opposite of a blanket freeze: that these cases will proceed one by one, through quashing petitions, discharge applications and, where appropriate, applications for withdrawal of prosecution with the court's consent after chargesheets are filed. Nobody builds a nationwide case-tracking fund for a war they expect to win outright at the threshold. The infrastructure is the real strategy, regardless of who eventually argues each matter. The press conference is something else.
What CJP is running, in other words, is a two-track operation dressed up as a single grievance. Track one is legal and procedurally realistic, already conceding that investigation will continue while contesting outcomes case by case, which is the only realistic path available once a court has declined to stay proceedings at the threshold. Track two is political theatre aimed squarely at the Centre's negotiating conscience, using the Court's order as a prop rather than a target. The threat of "fresh protest" is not a threat to the judiciary. No one seriously expects a rerun of Jantar Mantar to change what the bench already ordered. It is a threat to the government's willingness to keep whatever informal promises it made to get Dharmendra Pradhan's resignation and end the agitation in the first place. The Court is unlikely to be moved by renewed street mobilisation. The government, however, may be.
The government, for its part, has allowed itself to be caught in exactly the trap that badly negotiated political settlements always spring. If assurances were given during backchannel talks to end a protest, they should have been reduced to a recorded undertaking before the Court the moment the matter reached it, converting a deniable political promise into an enforceable one. Instead the Centre now gets to be accused of bad faith by CJP while simultaneously watching the Supreme Court decline to bail it out of a commitment it never bothered to formalise. That is not the Court failing anyone. That is a government that negotiated an end to a street agitation without ensuring those assurances were reflected in the judicial proceedings once the matter reached court.
The genuinely serious question buried under this theatre has nothing to do with whether FIRs against students are withdrawn on CJP's timeline. It is whether the parallel probe into police conduct, including the conduct that produced over two hundred injured personnel by the Centre's own account and the allegations the Court has been asked to examine at Sansad Marg, moves with anything like the urgency being demanded for the protesters' side of the ledger. If that probe crawls while the student FIRs proceed at full pace, CJP will have a legitimate grievance about asymmetry, and it will not need a press conference to make the point. Until then, what is being staged is less a constitutional standoff between the CJP and the Court than a public renegotiation of a private deal, with the judiciary cast, not entirely willingly, as the venue.
