Justice Surya Kant Sworn in as the new CJI; Pakistan Condemns Rajnath Singh’s Comment that Sindh Could One Day Return to India; Rahul Gandhi Says Election Commission's SIR is Causing Chaos and Deaths

Delhi’s Severe Pollution Forces BCCI to Change Cricket Tournament Schedule; Only Hindus Should be Admitted to Jammu Medical Institute, Demand BJP Leaders; Filmstar Dharmendra Passes Away at 89 Years

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Snapshot of the day

November 24, 2025

Sidharth Bhatia

Justice Surya Kant took oath today as the 53rd Chief Justice of India. He is scheduled to retire a little over 14 months from now, on February 9, 2027. Among the notable matters the 63-year-old Justice Kant has been involved in are last week’s ‘opinion’ on the Presidential Reference precluding the imposition of timelines on governors and the president for deciding on state Bills; challenges to the special intensive revision of electoral rolls, including in Bihar; the Haryana police’s case against political scientist Ali Khan Mahmudabad for his social media posts questioning the government’s optics on religious unity during Operation Sindoor – notably while granting bail to the professor Justice Kant had implied he was trying to “get cheap popularity” at a difficult time – the verdict approving the reading down of Article 370; and the use of the Pegasus spyware against journalists and opposition politicians.

Gautam Bhatia has a sharp commentary on the tenure of the outgoing Chief Justice of India:

“If there is one common thread that runs through the six-month tenure of Chief Justice B.R. Gavai – which ends today – it is that he treated his Chief Justiceship as a Choose Your Own Adventure story. If there was some long-standing precedent that he did not like, he used his powers as the master of the roster to overturn it. If another bench of the Court issued a ruling that he didn’t like, he set up his own bench and overruled it. It did not matter that in doing so established norms and conventions were shredded, entirely new jurisdictions were invented, and the rest of the Court was diminished. What mattered was the outcome, which – just incidentally – often happened to be aligned with the outcome that the central executive wanted.

CJI Gavai’s tenure was marked by the manipulation of the master of the roster’s powers to not just assign and list cases, but to actively interfere with decided (or pending) cases. The upshot of this – other than the gutting of the doctrine of precedent and the rule of law – is, of course, a diminished institution. It was bad enough that as “first among equals,” the Chief Justice had vast administrative powers of assignment and listing, which could influence outcomes. This influence, however, was indirect; under CJI Gavai’s tenure, this became direct interference, thus effectively rendering the Office of the Chief Justice far more than “first among equals”, and in every way, a superior among subordinates.”

Here’s a 360 degree view of CJI Gavai by Saurav Das arguing that he “was not a judge anchored in principle. He practised situational opportunism, marked by constitutional rhetoric but quiet abdication when it mattered.” His tenure continued to mirror the inconsistencies of the Chandrachud court – leaving a legacy of idealistic sound-bytes and cosmetic changes, writes Shourya Dasgupta in a hard-hitting piece.

Leader of Opposition and Congress leader Rahul Gandhi has heavily criticised the Election Commission of India’s (ECI) Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, alleging it has led to chaos and death of 16 Booth Level Officers (BLOs) in three weeks. “Under the guise of SIR, chaos has been unleashed across the country… Heart attacks, stress, suicides – SIR is no reform, it’s an imposed tyranny,” Gandhi said in a post on handle X, questioning the ECI’s intentions. He alleged the ECI’s system forces citizens to navigate thousands of scanned pages of a 22-year-old voter list, aiming to exhaust voters and facilitate vote theft and contrasted India’s IT prowess with the ECI’s reliance on paper-based processes.

Speaking of which,