Introduction

Courts are usually pictured as places that settle disputes between individuals — a landlord against a tenant, one company against another. But the judiciary in India does far more than that: it is one of the three organs of government, standing alongside the legislature and the executive, and it performs genuinely political functions, not merely legal ones.

The Supreme Court of India is, in fact, one of the most powerful courts anywhere in the world. Ever since the Constitution came into force in 1950, the judiciary has played a central role in interpreting the Constitution and in protecting it from being undermined by either of the other two organs of government. You have already seen, in the chapter on Fundamental Rights, how important the judiciary is for protecting the rights of citizens.

This chapter builds on that by asking a deeper question: what makes a judiciary trustworthy enough to be handed this much power? By the end of the chapter you should be able to explain the meaning of independence of the judiciary, the role the Indian judiciary plays in protecting our rights, the role it plays in interpreting the Constitution, and the relationship between the judiciary and Parliament — a relationship that, as you will see, has not always been a comfortable one.