India's Courts Are Busy — But Busy Doing What Exactly?

India's Supreme Court spent much of late May making headlines — and not all of them flattering. On 27 May 2026 alone, the country's top court produced a ruling on retrospective online gaming taxes, continued to shape debate over a disputed verdict on a prominent politician's conviction, and sat atop a judicial system whose lower benches were simultaneously acquitting wrongly convicted professors and reserving judgment on men who died in police custody. Add to that a Collegium recommendation to elevate four chief justices to the Supreme Court, and you have a judiciary that is undeniably busy. The harder question is whether the work adds up to justice.

The pattern worth tracing is this: India's courts are active, sometimes courageous, and increasingly caught in the political and economic crosscurrents they are supposed to arbitrate independently. A series of rulings over recent days reveals a system performing its constitutional function unevenly — capable on occasion of delivering hard verdicts against state overreach, yet also of lending judicial cover to aggressive government taxation and opaque appointment processes that have resisted reform for decades.

When the System Gets It Right — And Who Pays for the Getting It Wrong

The Calcutta High Court delivered one of the week's more striking interventions when it acquitted a professor who had spent nearly two decades in prison under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act. The court not only overturned the 20-year sentence but explicitly condemned the quality of the investigation and ordered government compensation. That the case took twenty years to unravel is itself a verdict on the system. Police and prosecutors had built a case apparently reliant on shortcuts and coercive methods — a pattern the judiciary identified as the root of the wrongful conviction. Compensation is small comfort to a man who lost two decades. But the court's willingness to name the failure explicitly matters: it signals that institutional self-correction, however slow, remains possible.

The Gujarat High Court, meanwhile, reserved judgment on a separate custodial death case involving a man accused of cow slaughter. The circumstances of his death while in state custody speak to a problem the Indian judiciary has addressed in litigation many times without fully eliminating. Whether Gujarat's court produces a verdict that names systemic culpability — or stops short at procedural observation — will determine whether this case joins the catalogue of custodial deaths that produced reforms or the larger catalogue of those that did not.

Both matters illustrate what courts do at their best: identifying state-inflicted harm, making it a matter of public record, and compelling accountability where executive machinery would prefer silence. Both also underscore how rarely such interventions arrive in time to prevent the damage, and how dependent their impact is on judicial willingness to go beyond formulaic language.

A Court That Taxes More Than It Guards

The Supreme Court's decision to uphold a 28 percent retrospective tax on online gaming sits less comfortably with the court's constitutional role. The Indian gaming industry argued that retrospectively applying a levy designed for the present gaming economy to prior years violated principles of taxation certainty and would damage a sector with genuine employment and investment potential. The court disagreed. In doing so, it effectively conferred judicial endorsement on a form of taxation that most regulatory conventions treat as abusive precisely because it shifts legal obligations after the fact. Companies that structured operations during years when the tax regime was ambiguous are now treated as having been in arrears.

This is not a ruling that checks state power. It is a ruling that broadens it — extending fiscal reach backward to capture revenues the government could not have collected under law as it existed at the time. Whether one views the gaming industry's grievances as legitimate or self-interested, the structural principle at stake is not trivial: when courts ratify retroactive taxation, they erode the predictability that underpins investment and formal economic activity. The absence of that predictability is a feature, not a bug, from the revenue collector's perspective. From an economy's perspective, it is a cost.

The Verdict Nobody Can Explain

The week's most politically charged judicial event did not actually generate a new ruling. Opposition politicians spent 27 May 2026 demanding explanations for a Supreme Court verdict on a Service Inputs and Returns — a category of electoral benefit — case that has yet to satisfy standard interpretive analysis. Legal observers and opposing counsel have found the court's reasoning difficult to parse in ways that create predictive utility for future cases. The political operation of the decision, however, has been clearer to those involved in electoral strategy. Whatever the judgment says, it has not been received as an application of settled doctrine.

Opposition concerns about the verdict's logic deserve more than dismissal as partisan grumbling. When a court's ruling on electoral law produces more questions than answers, the uncertainty does political work that a clearly reasoned judgment would not. Whether the ambiguity was intentional or incidental, its consequences fall unevenly — and those consequences are now a matter of public debate rather than legal resolution.

The Appointments Nobody Gets to See

Also on 27 May 2026, the judicial Collegium — the five-judge body that nominates Supreme Court judges — recommended the elevation of four chief justices and a senior advocate to the country's top court. The names are presumably distinguished. The process by which they were identified is not public. The Collegium has operated this way for decades, despite periodic reform commissions and sustained academic and bar criticism. Candidates are not subject to public hearings. Their judicial records are not formally evaluated against published criteria. The body that nominates them does not publish the reasoning.

A judiciary that appoints itself is a judiciary that is accountable primarily to itself. That arrangement has defenders who cite institutional culture and the risk of politicizing appointments were a more open process in place. The counterargument — that secrecy enables exactly the kind of quiet accommodation that invites politicization — is not diminished by the difficulty of proving specific instances of it. The pattern of judges arriving at the Supreme Court with documented political or ideological affinities that occasionally correlate suspiciously with prior executive relationships is not invented by critics. It is documented in their published opinions and the biographical records that follow them.

Narrow Victories and Systemic Stasis

Taken individually, each of these events has an explanation within standard legal frameworks. Courts rule on taxes. Courts acquit defendants. Courts reserve judgment. Courts recommend appointments. The system is functioning.

The systemic argument is harder to dismiss. The pattern running through the week's events is not malfunction but mission drift: a judiciary that reaches for state power as a solution to multiple kinds of disputes rather than a check on it. When courts ratify retrospective taxation, endorse investigative shortcuts by ignoring them until convicted persons appeal, or operate appointments through a process that would not survive scrutiny in any other constitutional branch, they are not merely deciding cases. They are defining their relationship to executive authority. That relationship is being defined in ways that favor the state more often than not.

The stakes are not abstract. An Indian judiciary that investors and citizens cannot reliably read — on taxation, on custodial practices, on electoral law, on the background of the judges themselves — is one whose legitimacy costs more than it deposits. The Calcutta acquittal proves the system can still produce justice. The online gaming ruling proves it can also produce policy dressed as law. The difference between the two is not in the court's competence. It is in the institution's willingness to ask consistently whose power it is checking — and to answer that question out loud.

Monexus reviewed four Indian Express stories spanning the Collegium recommendation, the Calcutta and Gujarat High Court decisions, and the online gaming tax ruling, and supplemented with the publication's reporting on the opposition's response to the SIR judgment. The opposition-sourced SIR materials appear primarily in the political-opinion register rather than legal analysis, and this treatment has been noted accordingly.