Chief Justice Surya Kant took oath as India’s 53rd CJI on November 24, 2025. In the months since, several benches led by him have delivered rulings that go well beyond routine disposal of appeals, and three in particular stand out for how differently they test the Court’s role. Here they are, with the bench, what was held, and why each one is worth remembering in more depth.
1. Association for Democratic Reforms v. Election Commission of India
Bench: CJI Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi
What was held: This case arose out of a challenge to the Special Intensive Revision, or SIR, an exercise the Election Commission uses to update and clean up electoral rolls, checking for duplicate entries, ineligible voters, and outdated records. Petitioners argued that the way the ECI was conducting this particular SIR conflicted with the procedures laid down in the Representation of the People Act, 1950, and the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960, essentially that the Commission was overstepping the statutory process Parliament had actually authorised.
The Bench disagreed. It held that the SIR exercise does not stand in conflict with either the RP Act or the 1960 Rules. It also does not detract from the constitutional imperative of free and fair elections. Importantly, the Court didn’t treat this as the ECI inventing a new power. It traced the Commission’s authority to conduct the SIR to Section 21(3) of the RP Act, read together with Article 324 of the Constitution. This vests the ECI with superintendence, direction, and control over elections. The reasoning was that the SIR is simply a tool for advancing the very objective Part XV of the Constitution. This part deals with elections, was designed to protect, an accurate, trustworthy electoral roll.
Why it matters: Article 324 is one of those constitutional provisions that sounds almost limitless, broad supervisory power over the entire election process, and cases testing its actual boundaries come up often in constitutional law. This one is particularly useful because it shows the Court’s method rather than just its conclusion: instead of deciding whether the SIR was a good idea, it asked whether a specific statutory provision, read alongside a broad constitutional article, actually supported what the ECI was doing. That’s a reasoning pattern worth internalising, since CLAT passages frequently set up exactly this kind of question, whether a body’s action fits within a source of power that sounds broad but has real limits.
2. The NEET Paper Leak Protest Violence Case
Bench: CJI Surya Kant, Justice Joymalya Bagchi, and Justice V. Mohana
What was held: This case grew out of student protests against the NEET paper leak, protests that in several states turned confrontational, with allegations of police using excessive force against demonstrators. Petitions connected to these incidents reached the Supreme Court, asking the Court to step in and ensure the violence was actually investigated rather than quietly absorbed into the news cycle.
The three-judge Bench found that there was a prima facie case for an independent and impartial investigation into the violence. Rather than examining the incidents itself or directing a single national inquiry, the Court issued notice to seven states individually, Maharashtra, Bihar, Assam, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, West Bengal, and Kerala, effectively asking each state to respond to the specific allegations raised against its own police action.
Why it matters: This case sits right at the point where two constitutional principles pull against each other, the right to peaceful protest and the State’s obligation to maintain order. It’s a clean illustration of how the Court manages that tension without picking a side outright. By finding a prima facie case for independent investigation rather than issuing sweeping directions, the Bench kept its intervention narrow and evidence-drive.
For CLAT preparation, this is a good example of judicial restraint paired with judicial oversight. The Court didn’t investigate the incidents itself, but it also didn’t simply defer to the states either.
3. Harshita Grover v. Union of India
Bench: CJI Surya Kant, Justice Joymalya Bagchi, and Justice V. Mohana
What was held: In this case, Journalist Harshita Grover filed a PIL raising a complaint. The complaint said that courtroom exchanges, often just fragments of a much longer hearing, were being clipped, edited, and circulated on social media in ways that stripped away context. In some cases, misrepresented what judges had actually said. The Solicitor General told the Bench that some courts had effectively become “social media celebrities” through this kind of selective circulation. CJI Kant himself noted that comments he’d never made had been attributed to him in earlier media coverage.
The Bench responded with an interim order: no posting, reposting, extraction, modification, dissemination, monetisation, recording, or review of live-streamed proceedings on social media or any other digital platform. Prior permission from the Secretary General of the Supreme Court or the Registrar General of the concerned High Court is required. It specifically carved out an exception for genuine news reporting, so the order isn’t a blanket restriction on covering what happens in court, just on the unauthorised repackaging of raw footage for engagement or profit. The Court also issued notice to the Centre, all High Courts, and major digital platforms, including Meta and X, asking them to respond before the matter is heard further.
Why it matters: Live-streaming of Indian courts is still a relatively recent development. This order captures the judiciary grappling with a problem that openness itself created, once proceedings are public and recorded, controlling how that footage gets used afterward becomes a genuinely hard line to draw. What makes this case worth remembering isn’t just the outcome. The reasoning behind it: transparency and dignity of the court aren’t treated as opposites here. The order tries to preserve open justice through the news-reporting exception while still curbing the specific harm of decontextualised, monetised clips. It’s a useful reminder that even the Court’s own transparency measures aren’t beyond judicial correction once they start being misused.
Conclusion
These three cases don’t share a subject, one is about electoral administration, another about protest and police accountability, and the third about the judiciary’s own digital footprint. But taken together, they say something about the kind of problems a CJI-led bench is actually spending its time on right now: mass electoral roll revisions operating at a scale unimaginable a generation ago, student protests that are organised and amplified entirely online, and courtrooms that have themselves become raw material for social media content. That range is worth tracking closely, because it reflects not just individual legal outcomes, but how the Supreme Court is adapting its own role to problems that didn’t really exist in this form even ten years ago.
Written By – Khushi Mittal
