Some of the witnesses the CBI needs to find were last seen fleeing their own homes. Two years on, the Supreme Court is now asking who can still be located and who can still be heard.

WHEN THE COURT STOPS ADJUDICATING AND STARTS MANAGING

The Supreme Court does not ordinarily decide which courtroom a trial happens in or how fast an investigating officer must move. Article 142 lets it do exactly that "for doing complete justice"

• and the Manipur proposal is that power being used almost administratively, because the ordinary machinery of the state has stalled.

What Article 142 Actually Authorises Article 142

gives the Supreme Court power to pass any order necessary for complete justice "in any cause or matter pending before it." It is not a general supervisory power over state administration - it is tied to a specific pending case.

Here, that tether is the batch of Manipur petitions. Because those petitions are before it, the Court can order special courts, direct police cooperation and demand case-status reports - steps that look like criminal-justice administration but are legally anchored in its adjudicatory role over the specific litigation in front of it.

Why This Case Needed That Power The

Bench's own reasoning names the trigger: witnesses displaced or relocated, internet suspensions blocking digital evidence and restrictions on investigators' movement - a description of state machinery genuinely unable to function under conflict conditions, not merely working slowly. The Court did not invent this remedy from nothing. In Zahira Habibullah Sheikh v. State of Gujarat (2004)

• the Best Bakery case - it established that when local conditions threaten a trial's fairness, transferring proceedings and mandating day-to-day hearings is a legitimate judicial response, not an overreach. That precedent is doing real work here: it is the reason the Court can propose special courts for Manipur without this looking like an unprecedented expansion of its role.

The Genuine Institutional Question

The exam-relevant tension is this: every time the Court steps into case management because state agencies have stalled, it also confirms that ordinary constitutional machinery - state police, state prosecution, functioning connectivity - was not equal to the moment.

The special courts fix today's delay. They do not fix why civilian investigators could not move freely or why witnesses could not be reached in the first place. That gap between judicial remedy and administrative cause is exactly what makes this more than a procedural update - it is a live illustration of what happens when a state's own institutions cannot deliver Article 21's promise of a speedy trial on their own.