Cholleti

India’scourts are experiencing a crisis of institutional confidence — not from judicial malfeasance, but from structural vulnerabilities that permit conduct appearing to compromise impartiality. A lawyer defends one side, then appears against it. A judge’s child receives hundreds of government cases through prosecutors appearing before the same judge. No rules forbid it. No mechanism stops it. This is not merely a governance failure but a betrayal of the foundational compact between courts and citizens — one playing out in quiet procedural rooms, far removed from grand courtroom drama.

The Kakinada Episode-Fraud named:

Advocate S Pranathi represents landowners from Kakinada in a property dispute. Months later, as the State’s Special Government Pleader, she switches sides and opposes them. Her husband, Meka Rahul Chowdary, steps in to argue her abandoned brief. The Kakinada Municipal Corporation simultaneously reverses its own legal position without explanation. The Andhra Pradesh High Court on July 28 — in Review Petition No. 2 of 2026 in WP Nos. 11254 of 2013 and 13428 of 2015 — examined the docket orders, vakalatnamas, and the conduct of the counsels involved, and found evidence of collusion, professional misconduct, conflict of interest, and “a deliberate attempt to commit fraud on this court.”

The court was unsparing: “The Counsel appearing for the State and its instrumentalities have failed in discharging their fiduciary duty.” It ordered a criminal probe by the Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB), calling for a report within twelve weeks.This case is a symptom — not an exception. It illuminates four interconnected failures: the collapse of professional ethics among advocates; unspoken nepotism in government counsel appointments; absence of meaningful recusal standards for judges, and inadequacy of the Bar Council disciplinary machinery.

The oath forgotten:

The Advocates Act, 1961, and Bar Council of India Rules prescribe unambiguous standards. They demand respect for courts, impose fiduciary duty — loyalty, confidentiality, undivided allegiance. An advocate who switches sides, or whose spouse argues the opposite brief, violates this core compact. Under Section 35, State Bar Councils can punish misconduct with reprimand, suspension, or permanent removal from the roll.

Yet disciplinary action remains slow and inconsistent. In March last year, the Bar Council of India issued a directive against advocates advertising through social media influencers — a development that would have been inconceivable a generation ago, and one that speaks to how far institutional drift has gone. When the Bar Council is issuing social media advisories instead of conducting disciplinary proceedings against ethical violations, the profession’s moral compass has drifted dangerously off course.

When family becomes the conflict:

Beyond individual misconduct lies a systemic question: whether children of sitting judges receiving government counsel appointments creates an appearance of institutional conflict that a democracy cannot afford to ignore. Last December, the Delhi High Court heard public interest litigations by the First Generation Lawyers’ Association, challenging preferential allotment of lawyers’ chambers to relatives of retiring advocates — a practice the court found prima facie violative of Article 14. In the same month, the government was asked to explain its empanelment of over 650 advocates as Central Government counsel in the Supreme Court, several reportedly enrolled only in 2024–2025, many yet to clear the All India Bar Examination.

In August 2025, the Allahabad High Court in Jubeda Begum v. UPSRTC decried an “entitlement culture” in state counsel appointments, recalling the Supreme Court’s 1991 ruling in Kumari Shrilekha Vidyarthi v. State of U P that mandated transparent, merit-based procedures. Justice Ajay Bhanot observed that “modes of appointment which accord weight to accidents of inheritance and neglect achievements of merit cannot be countenanced.” The human cost is felt by the first-generation lawyer — the son of a farmer, the daughter of a schoolteacher — who watches the doors of patronage remain closed while they swing open for the well-connected.

The recusal question-Justice must be seen:

No episode illustrates the tension between judicial privilege and public confidence more sharply than the Delhi High Court recusal controversy of 2026. Former Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, appearing in person in the CBI’s revision petition against his discharge in the excise policy case, sought recusal of Justice Swarana Kanta Sharma on the ground that both her children were empanelled as Central Government counsel — work allocated through the same senior law officers appearing against him in her court.

In April, Justice Sharma dismissed the recusal applications, holding that her children’s professional engagements created no financial or personal stake in the outcome, and that accepting such grounds would require “a large part of the judiciary” to recuse in similar cases.

The observation, while judicially defensible, sits uneasily alongside principle. The Restatement of Values of Judicial Life, adopted by all Supreme Court judges in 1997 under Chief Justice J S Verma, urges that where close relatives of a judge may gain undue advantage, the judge should — in the interests of the appearance of justice — opt for transfer. This is a voluntary ethical code with no enforcement mechanism.The asymmetry is stark: Rule 6 of the Bar Council Rules prohibits advocates from practising before courts where a close relative serves as a judge — but that obligation binds the advocate, not the judge.

In Rajasthan, the government amended its eligibility criteria to accommodate the son of a senior official as Additional Advocate General, notwithstanding the mandatory ten-year practice requirement. When the nepotism allegation surfaced publicly — ahead of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Jodhpur in August 2024 — the appointee resigned. The system responded not to principle, but to political pressure.

Contrast this with Justice Sujoy Paul, who in early 2024 voluntarily sought transfer from the Madhya Pradesh High Court to the Telangana High Court because his son practised in the same court. That act of quiet integrity, barely reported, is precisely the standard the system needs — and rarely demands.

The way forward:

None of these amount to an indictment of the judiciary or the Bar. The overwhelming majority of advocates serve with dedication, and most judges discharge their duties with independence. The system is not broken — but its foundations are being tested in ways that demand structural response, not merely individual virtue.

India needs a binding, transparent, and institutionally reviewable judicial recusal framework. It needs merit-based, publicly disclosed criteria for government counsel empanelment. It needs the Bar Council’s disciplinary machinery to function with the urgency this moment demands. And it needs ordinary litigants — carrying nothing but faith in the court’s impartiality — to have that faith restored. The Andhra Pradesh High Court’s order is, in one sense, proof that the system can work: a judge saw fraud, named it, and acted. That is reason enough for measured hope. The question now is whether the institutions around that judge will do the same.

(The writer is with the Cholleti BlackRobe Chambers, Hyderabad, and writes on economy, politics and law)