Two years of live streaming at the Supreme Court

Transcript: 

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Two years ago, the Supreme Court live streamed Constitution bench hearings on YouTube for the first time. In the first few minutes of the hearing, in courtroom 2, where the incumbent Chief Justice D.Y. Chandrachud was presiding, the control room was busy trying to get the camera focus right. It first panned only to Justice P.S. Narasimha, who was on the far right of the five-judge bench, and then to just the three judges in the centre. The camera then swiveled and zoomed in on the ceiling fan before finally fitting all five judges into the frame.

It had been four years since the Supreme Court first agreed to comply with a law student’s plea to set up live streaming rooms within the court premises. Argued by legal heavyweights like Indira Jaising, Swapnil Tripathi v Supreme Court of India (2018) would mark a turning point in how people engage with constitutional courts, institutions that are often viewed as daunting and foreboding.

The High Courts went first. In October 2020, the Gujarat High Court became the first court in India to livestream its proceedings. In 2021, the Supreme Court’s e-committee released draft rules on live streaming of High Court proceedings. During the hijab ban hearings in the Karnataka High Court in February 2022, over two lakh viewers tuned in. Clips of the proceedings were circulated on WhatsApp groups and then brandished to make points in dinner table conversations.

This virality reopened the question: Is dramatisation of justice, the cost of transparency?

Before the Supreme Court launched its live streaming in 2022, we wondered in our newsletter how soon it would be before counsel and judges began to perform for the audience. How long before content creators would stitch together clips out of context, trading accuracy for likes and shares?

These questions still crop up from time to time. During the recent hearings on the horrifying rape and murder of the woman doctor in the Kolkata hospital, Senior Advocate Kapil Sibal lamented that his words were being mangled and circulated in the media, destroying a 50-year reputation. “Why should we be vilified in this fashion?” He asked. Worse still, the women in his office were receiving frightful threats.

Sibal invoked Swapnil Tripathi, reminding the bench that the judgement included all matters relating to sexual assault and rape among the cases that could not be live streamed. CJI Chandrachud, who was on the bench that decided Swapnil Tripathi, said that the Kolkata case would be continued to be live streamed in public interest. In its upload of the proceedings on its YouTube channel, the Supreme Court has deleted this exchange between the Chief and Sibal. Ironically, the only record that remains are clips stitched together by media houses and content creators.

Recently, as the Supreme Court has started live streaming select Division Bench cases, the lines between public interest and institutional posturing have become somewhat blurrier. “Trust us we’re here,” the Chief reassured the agitating doctors during one of the R.G. Kar hearings. “This affects 23 lakh students. Let us not be in self-denial,” the Court said to assuage aspirants in the UG NEET case.

Even as the Court’s utterances during hearings have no binding value, they reverberate well beyond the two lakh subscribers to its YouTube channel and the few thousands who log into the stream. Live streaming has created a sense of familiarity with the court’s proceedings and its people. It has helped shed the idea that access to the Supreme Court is only for those in the capital.

For us at SCO, thanks to the pause and rewind features of live stream videos, we can write more detailed and accurate reports for you. But the sneaky feeling of live streaming having the potential to tilt the scale of justice remains. It offers a tool to the Court to manage its reputation among the public. It may obscure the fact that even though a door to the Supreme Court may now be open, it can still be locked from the inside.

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