The Supreme Court on Thursday, 15 October 2026, issued notice to the Congress party, Rahul Gandhi and other INDIA bloc leaders on a plea filed by four advocates over the opposition’s march to the court on 12 October, according to Bar & Bench, Business Standard and Free Press Journal. A bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi sought responses from them.
The plea was filed by the advocates Digant Mishra, Divyansh Bisht, Ashish Gopal Garg and Shweta Garg through the advocate-on-record Utkarsh Jaiswal, according to the reports. They ask the court for a uniform regulatory framework to prevent political demonstrations and processions within court premises and to regulate protests in the vicinity of the Supreme Court and the High Courts, according to Bar & Bench.
India Legal’s headline says that the plea also seeks criminal contempt action against Rahul Gandhi. IndiaX24 did not open the full article, so it does not set out the plea’s contempt allegations or say which reliefs the court has agreed to consider.
The plea also refers to a social media post. It was filed after the opposition march of 12 October, when the leaders went to the Supreme Court and entered the registry to file a petition, and after a post by the Congress’s Kerala unit on X that called on the Chief Justice to resign if he could not handle law and order, according to Bar & Bench. The reports reviewed do not give the text of the post or say whether the party has withdrawn it.
The Chief Justice made remarks in the hearing. ‘We are not sitting in ivory towers. We know what statements they are making outside and what they are saying in court. We know everything,’ he said, according to Bar & Bench. IndiaX24 reports separately on his statement that nobody can browbeat the court.
The court clarified that the notice did not approve the leaders’ conduct, according to the other reports of the hearing that IndiaX24 has covered. The notice is returnable, which means that the respondents must file replies by a date that the reports reviewed do not give.
This is a separate case from the main hearing. The same day, the same bench issued notice to the Election Commission and the Chief Election Commissioner on the opposition’s petitions against the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls, and the court asked a petitioner to explain his conduct at the next hearing, as IndiaX24 has reported. The lawyers’ plea is a public-interest petition about the use of court premises for protest and not about the SIR itself.
The questions it raises are practical. Court premises are usually subject to security rules, and demonstrations near courts have been restricted in different ways by different courts, according to general background that the reports do not detail. A uniform framework would need to balance the right to protest with the court’s need to function, and the reports reviewed do not say what the court thinks of the idea.
IndiaX24 will report on the replies and the next hearing.
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.