Editor,
A law student, interning with a man widely regarded as a stalwart of the High Court of Meghalaya, has accused him of harassing her inside his own chamber and then offering her Rs. 500 to make sure she never spoke of it again.
That chamber sits within the precincts of the highest court in the state. It sits, that is, in the one place a person is entitled to walk into expecting justice, where the promise of safety for one’s rights is supposed to be at its strongest, not its weakest. That this is where the incident occurred does not just implicate one man. It implicates the sanctity of the space itself, and of every advocate whose workplace this now is.
The expected response, the only response consistent with that sanctity, was swift and unambiguous condemnation, and support for the strictest possible action against the accused. That is not what happened. The Meghalaya High Court Bar has shown no visible sign of being troubled by what was alleged. Instead, it moved quickly to rally behind the accused, framing the group that took him to the police station, the group that ensured the survivor’s complaint was actually registered as a “mob” whose conduct violated his rights.
It is worth sitting with the speed of that response, because speed is rarely accidental. An institution can take months to acknowledge a survivor and mere hours to close ranks around one of its own. When solidarity moves that much faster than scrutiny, it is fair to ask what, exactly, is being protected, the rights of an accused advocate, or the comfort of an establishment that would rather this story end quietly than see where it leads. A single, contained incident is a controversy the Bar can manage. A pattern, once it is allowed to be seen as a pattern, is something closer to a reckoning. It is difficult not to wonder whether what looks like principle is, in part, an effort to make sure the second thing never gets the chance to become the first.
That question sits underneath the more obvious ones the Bar’s conduct forces us to ask. Does the accused’s right to due process now outrank the survivor’s right to be heard at all? For a profession that constitutes one of the most powerful constituencies within the justice system, does allegiance to one’s own simply outweigh the grundnorm – the basic, prior claim that another person’s dignity and safety are entitled to respect? Or, more plainly: was this a gendered choice, dressed up as a principled one?
None of this happens in a vacuum. The legal profession has long been described as an “old boys’ club”, defined by informal networks, male-dominated leadership, and a culture of mutual protection that runs on personal loyalty rather than merit. That culture starves women of mentorship, denies them leadership, and treats their accounts, when inconvenient, as disposable. The dismal representation of women in the higher judiciary is not a coincidence; it is the visible tip of exactly this. It should surprise no one that women leave litigation practice at the rates they do, when the profession’s most senior members demonstrate, in moments like this one, whose voice is worth defending.
India’s constitutional promise is that when every other remedy fails, the courts remain. It is a promise so foundational that 5.19 crore (51.9 million) cases currently sit pending before Indian courts, a staggering measure of how many people are still willing to bet on that promise. But an incident like this asks a harder question, is that promise actually available to everyone, or only to those who do not have to walk into it against the resistance of the very Bar meant to uphold it? Are our courtrooms genuinely free of the epistemic injustice that patriarchy produces, namely, the reflex to disbelieve, minimise, or reframe a woman’s account before it is even tested?
Because here is what a young woman entering this profession is actually being taught right now. She is watching what it costs to name a senior advocate, watching the Bar’s most established members choose sides before any inquiry has run its course, watching an act of protection get relabelled as mob behaviour. She has to weigh that against the disparity in power and precedent whenever she considers walking into a police station and putting a name to what happened to her. This is the calculation the Bar’s response is handing to every young woman who might one day consider joining this profession, or litigating within it. Would she not think twice? And if the Bar’s posture today, whether by design or by reflex, succeeds in keeping this contained, in making sure it never becomes more than a single, forgettable dispute, what does that tell the next one who has something to report, and the one after her?
That is the real cost of closing ranks this quickly. Not just one complaint, managed and moved past but a lesson, delivered to an entire generation of women watching how this profession treats its own, about exactly how much it is safe to say.
Yours etc.,
A concerned citizen
