Chief Justice of India Surya Kant said ‘Nobody can browbeat us’ on 15 October 2026 while hearing petitions by INDIA bloc leaders against the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls, according to The News Minute. The Chief Justice was responding to the march that opposition leaders, including Rahul Gandhi, made to the Supreme Court on 12 October.
The march took place after the Chief Justice declined their request for a direct meeting to present their concerns about the SIR, according to the report. IndiaX24 reported on 12 October that the CJI had declined the Congress’s request for a meeting about the voters’ list and that the Supreme Court had said that it had never ruled on the new Form 6.
The Chief Justice said: ‘These are feeble attempts that nobody takes note of. We are not sitting in ivory towers. We know what statements they make outside and what they say in court,’ according to The News Minute. The remarks were made while he dismissed the idea that the court could be affected by political pressure from the march.
The petitions were filed by Rahul Gandhi, Mallikarjun Kharge, Akhilesh Yadav, Tejashwi Yadav and representatives of several other opposition parties, according to the report. The bench, which included Justice Joymalya Bagchi according to The Week, issued notice to the Election Commission, and IndiaX24 reports on that order in a separate article.
The court also ordered that CCTV footage be preserved. This followed an allegation that a pregnant journalist was injured during the march, according to The News Minute. The reports reviewed do not give the name of the journalist, the extent of any injury or who made the allegation, and they do not say which cameras are covered by the order.
The bench made it clear that issuing notice did not mean that it approved the conduct of the leaders. The Week’s headline says that the court asked Rahul Gandhi to explain the march, and the account says that the CJI wanted one of the petitioners to explain his conduct at the next hearing. That means that the march, and not only the SIR, will be part of the next hearing.
The exchange shows a tension between the opposition and the judiciary. The opposition says that the SIR has led to large-scale deletion of voters, while the court has to decide the legal questions in the petitions without being seen to respond to street pressure. The Chief Justice’s words are his own, and the sources reviewed do not carry a response from the opposition leaders to them.
Opposition leaders have been mobilising on the issue. IndiaX24 reported earlier that a protest in Delhi over the Election Commission led to a lockdown of parts of the capital, and that Jantar Mantar was removed as a protest site with three new venues named by the Delhi Police. The sources reviewed do not connect those decisions to the march of 12 October.
The next hearing date was not given in the reports reviewed. IndiaX24 will report what the court decides about the march and the petitions.
Image: The Supreme Court of India building in New Delhi (file photo). Photo by Subhashish Panigrahi, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.