Solidarity or the Courtroom? The Allahabad Protest and What Officers of the Court Owe the Litigant Next Door

Two Loyalties in One Corridor: Why Solidarity Cannot Be Paid

For by the Litigant Next Door Imagine you are an office-bearer of the Allahabad High Court Bar Association. Yesterday, according to your Association's letter to Chief Justice Arun Bhansali, a colleague was threatened with jail in Justice Ajay Bhanot's court after asking a Superintendent of Police to give up a seat.

The letter says he was made to apologise to the officer even after apologising to the court and that a senior advocate in the room was mocked. To many lawyers, this looks like a judge placing the police above the Bar. This morning, lawyers gather outside Court No. 49.

By the time the protest ends, furniture has allegedly been thrown towards the dais. Next door in Court No. 66, a bail hearing has been stopped by the noise. The easy answer would be to condemn the protest and move on. But the grievance behind it is not frivolous and that is what makes the dilemma real.

Why both loyalties carry weight - Solidarity with a colleague. Advocates depend on equal dignity before the bench to represent clients without fear.

If the allegations are true, a practice of seating police officers ahead of counsel, combined with a threat of jail, damages that dignity. A Bar that stays silent invites more of the same.

• Duty to the court and the litigant. Advocates are officers of the court. Justice Arun Kumar Singh Deshwal said in his order that poor litigants come to the High Court for relief and should not suffer because lawyers have a quarrel with one judge. The accused whose bail hearing was interrupted had nothing to do with the dispute in Court No. 49. The allegations against Justice Bhanot remain unproven. A family member of the senior advocate described the exchange as ordinary banter and Advocate S.M. Haider Rizvi describes the judge as a stickler for courtroom discipline.

The framework:

duty to the institution The Supreme Court resolved this tension in Ex-Capt. Harish Uppal v. Union of India (2002). It held that lawyers have no right to strike or boycott courts, because doing so holds litigants hostage.

Protests may take place, but outside court premises and without disrupting proceedings. Applied here, the deontological duty of an officer of the court is clear: you may challenge a judge, but not by stopping justice for others.

A consequentialist reading reaches the same place. Disruption harmed people with no stake in the grievance, while legitimate channels were already open.

The resolution Those channels are real:

• The Association's letter to the Chief Justice, already sent on 27 October.
• The In-House Procedure (1999) for complaints against High Court judges, which allows the Chief Justice to examine allegations. I would choose to pursue the grievance through those channels and to publicly disown the disruption, even at the cost of appearing to abandon a colleague in the moment. That cost is real: some lawyers will read it as weakness. But the Bar's dignity is better defended by a documented complaint than by an interrupted bail hearing. The court, in turn, owes the Bar a fair examination of whether its seating practices undermine equal dignity before the bench.