There is a story that travels quietly across generations, never written into law, never debated in Parliament, but understood instinctively by those who have lived long enough to see systems change. Two men walk into two different temples, carrying the same prayer. One returns, believing he has been heard. The other returns in silence, convinced that something—either in the prayer or in the place—failed him. Neither man questions faith immediately. They question where they stood when they asked for it. Over time, belief does not disappear; it simply becomes selective. It begins to depend on geography.
It was perhaps this quiet discomfort that found a name on April 18, when a symposium in Bengaluru gathered voices to speak about “reimagining the judiciary in the era of Artificial Intelligence." It did not feel, at the time, like a radical idea. It sounded academic, almost distant—another conversation about technology, another panel about the future. But somewhere within that discussion, a thought lingered longer than the rest. Not about what AI could do to the judiciary, but about what the judiciary, in its current form, was already struggling to do for itself.
The Indian judiciary was never meant to feel like that, and yet, increasingly, it does.
At this recent gathering in Bengaluru, CJI Surya Kant articulated a position that instinctively resonates with anyone who has ever feared the coldness of machines entering spaces meant for human judgment. Justice, he said, must remain human. It must not be surrendered to artificial intelligence, to algorithms that cannot feel, cannot weigh moral consequence, cannot pause at the edge of a life-altering decision and sense the gravity of it. The warning carried within it a deeper anxiety—that in our rush for efficiency, we might strip justice of its soul.
It is a powerful argument. Almost unassailable.
And yet, it leaves behind a question that refuses to stay quiet.
If justice is already human, then why does it not feel the same everywhere?
The discomfort does not arise from a single judgment or a single courtroom. It accumulates slowly, across cases, across years, across patterns that no one officially acknowledges but everyone quietly notices. In the case involving Pawan Khera, the issue was not of guilt but of liberty, not of conviction but of protection. One court extended a shield, another examined whether that shield should exist at all. Legally, this is how the system is designed to function; hierarchies exist to correct, to reinterpret, to refine. But outside the legal vocabulary, in the mind of the citizen, a simpler question forms. If liberty itself can shift shape depending on where one stands, then what exactly is constant?
That question grows heavier when placed beside the long, unbroken detention of Umar Khalid, where time itself becomes part of the experience of justice. The law speaks the language of procedure, of necessity, of conditions that justify continued custody. But time does not speak in legal terms. Time accumulates differently for the one waiting. It stretches, it settles, it transforms process into something that begins to feel indistinguishable from outcome. At what point does the system, while insisting it is still deciding, begin to deliver a reality that feels final?
There are moments when the law itself offers comparisons the system does not explicitly acknowledge. Individuals like Sonam Wangchuk and Umar Khalid have, at different times, come into the ambit of stringent legal provisions, and yet their journeys through the system have not unfolded with the same pace or outcome—some find relief sooner, others remain within the process far longer.
And somewhere along this journey, the mind begins to make comparisons it was not explicitly asked to make. It begins to wonder whether two individuals, standing in different ideological spaces, invoking different narratives, are also received differently by the system meant to remain above both. It wonders whether the place from which one speaks—or the crowd that stands behind them—quietly shapes the way the law approaches them. These are not conclusions. They are discomforts. But discomfort, when repeated often enough, begins to resemble pattern.
There is another kind of story that rarely makes headlines because it is too ordinary to be news. A man accused of a minor offence spends years attending court hearings, travelling long distances, losing workdays, answering the same questions in slightly different forms. Each adjournment is legal. Each delay is explainable. Each step follows procedure. And yet, by the time the case concludes—whether in acquittal or conviction—the man has already paid a price that no judgment accounts for. His punishment, if it can be called that, was not in the verdict. It was in the journey. The system never intended to punish him before deciding his guilt. But intention, in such cases, becomes irrelevant. Experience takes over.
Then there are moments that shake the entire nation, not as legal events but as collective wounds. The Pulwama attack was not just an act of violence; it was a rupture that demanded clarity, not only in response but in accountability. Years later, what lingers is not only memory but a distance between the enormity of the event and the visible pace of its judicial journey. The law continues to move, but it does so in a way that is not always visible to those who seek closure, and in that invisibility, doubt quietly takes root.
History, if one listens carefully, offers similar warnings. There was a time when emperors held open courts, where justice was dispensed in public view. The king would listen, decide, and pronounce. It was immediate, visible, human. But it was also inconsistent, shaped by mood, influence, proximity. Over time, societies moved away from that model, not because it lacked humanity, but because it lacked predictability. Law replaced discretion. Procedure replaced impulse. Systems were built not to remove the human, but to restrain the excesses of human variation.
And yet, here we are again, in a system that prides itself on human judgment, quietly confronting the same old question—how much variation is too much?
There are cases that disturb not because of what they reveal about individuals, but because of what they suggest about the system itself. The arrest of Davinder Singh, a man entrusted with enforcing the law, under allegations of aiding those who stand against it, was one such moment. When the line between protector and violator blurs, the expectation is not merely investigation but unmistakable clarity. When that clarity does not arrive with equal force, the system does not collapse, but it does lose a degree of its certainty.
Move through the country, and similar fragments appear. In Pahalgam, violence leaves behind questions that do not always find equal urgency in resolution. In Delhi, the Delhi riots 2020 created not one narrative but many, each travelling through the legal system at its own speed, its own direction, rarely converging into a single, coherent sense of justice. In smaller towns, in quieter corners, acts of mob lynching unfold with a brutality that bypasses the law entirely, and when the law does respond, its pace and intensity do not always match the violence it seeks to address.
One is tempted to believe that these are isolated imperfections in an otherwise functioning system. But repetition has a way of changing interpretation. What appears as exception once begins to resemble pattern when seen often enough.
There is a philosophical story about a blindfolded archer. He is told to shoot at a target he cannot see. Around him, voices guide him—some sincere, some misleading, some confused. He listens, adjusts, releases the arrow. Sometimes he hits. Sometimes he misses. When he hits, the system celebrates his skill. When he misses, the system blames the noise. But the deeper question is never asked—why is the archer blindfolded in the first place?
Judges today are not blindfolded by design. But they operate within a system that limits what they can see in real time. Precedents exist, but they are scattered across time, across jurisdictions, across volumes that no single human mind can fully access at the moment of decision. Each judge relies on what is presented, what is cited, what is known. Within those boundaries, judgment is exercised with sincerity, with intellect, with intent.
But sincerity does not guarantee consistency.
It is in this gap that the idea of Artificial Intelligence begins to provoke discomfort. Because AI, at its core, does something deceptively simple—it removes the blindfold. It gathers, connects, and presents the full landscape of similar decisions, not selectively, not partially, but comprehensively. It does not argue. It does not persuade. It does not decide. It simply shows.
And sometimes, what it shows is inconvenient.
Because it reveals that similar cases have ended differently. That patterns exist where none were acknowledged. That divergence is not occasional, but structural.
The fear, as articulated by CJI Surya Kant, is that AI may hallucinate, fabricate, mislead. That it may introduce a new form of uncertainty into a system that already struggles with complexity. This fear is not unfounded. Technology is not neutral; it carries the biases of its design, the limitations of its data.
But there is another fear, less openly expressed.
The fear that AI may expose what we have learned to live with.
Because inconsistency, when invisible, can be explained. When visible, it demands justification.
Justice Nagarathna speaks of integrity, of removing those who compromise the system from within. It is a necessary call. But integrity, while essential, addresses only one dimension of the problem. A system can be entirely honest and still deeply inconsistent. It can be free of corruption and yet difficult to predict. And for a citizen, unpredictability often feels indistinguishable from unfairness.
There is a moment in the Mahabharata where Yudhishthira, known for his commitment to truth, is compelled to speak a half-truth that alters the course of the war. The act is justified within the logic of the moment, within the necessity of strategy. But it leaves behind a question that echoes beyond the battlefield—does righteousness remain intact when it bends, even for a reason?
The judiciary today does not deal in half-truths. It deals in interpretations. But interpretation, when stretched across different minds, different courts, different contexts, begins to produce outcomes that feel disconnected from one another. Each is justified. Each is reasoned. And yet, together, they create a landscape that is difficult to reconcile.
Artificial Intelligence, in this narrative, is not an intruder. It is a witness. It observes, records, connects. It brings into one frame what is otherwise dispersed. It does not eliminate judgment. It situates it within a broader awareness.
And perhaps that is what makes it necessary.
Because the question is no longer whether justice should remain human. It must. The question is whether human judgment should continue to operate without a system that ensures that its expressions do not drift too far apart.
A nation as vast and complex as India cannot afford a judiciary that feels different in different places. It cannot afford a system where outcomes appear to depend on location, on timing, on the invisible variables that the citizen cannot fully understand but instinctively senses.
If two individuals, governed by the same Constitution, presenting similar facts, seeking similar relief, walk into two different courts and walk out with different realities, the system will offer explanations. It will point to distinctions, to nuances, to legal reasoning that justifies the divergence.
But the citizen will carry something else.
A quiet doubt.
And doubt, once planted, does not require proof to grow.
It requires repetition.
And that repetition is what we are beginning to see.
There is another story, older than the ones we have been speaking of, and in some ways more revealing because it does not hide behind complexity. It is simple, almost uncomfortable in its simplicity. A woman, elected as a Gram Panchayat President in West Bengal, finds herself standing before a courtroom. The issue before the court concerns alleged illegal construction. The law has every right to question her. Accountability is not optional in public office. But somewhere during that exchange, the focus shifts. It moves from the act to the individual. From the legality of construction to the education of the person. The court remarks upon her lack of formal education, her dependence on her husband, her position as someone perhaps placed in power without agency of her own.
And in that moment, a quiet discomfort begins to form.
Because the Constitution does not promise justice only to the educated. It does not reserve dignity for those who can articulate it fluently. It does not say that those who enter public life without formal schooling must first prove their worth before being heard with equal respect. If anything, the system is meant to protect precisely those who enter its spaces without privilege.
So, the question that lingers is not about the case itself. It is about the language. When does judicial scrutiny become personal commentary? When does accountability cross into characterisation? And more importantly, would the same tone survive if the individual before the court carried a different political identity, a different social position, a different kind of power?
The question is not whether the judge was right in law.
The question is whether the law sounded the same for everyone.
That unease does not remain isolated.
In another courtroom, in another matter, the proceedings involving Arvind Kejriwal brought forward a different kind of moment. A request is made. A concern is raised about ideological positioning, about perceived predisposition. The court responds, and in its response lies something that appears reasonable in isolation—that ideological disagreement is not, in itself, a ground for recusal. That a judge is expected to rise above personal belief.
And that is correct.
But again, the citizen does not experience judgments in isolation. They are experienced cumulatively. And when statements begin to enter the realm of ideology, even in dismissal of it, they leave behind a trace. Not of bias necessarily—but of proximity to it.
And when awareness exists, the expectation of distance becomes stronger.
Because neutrality is not only about being fair.
It is about appearing unmistakably fair.
Then there are moments where the system moves with remarkable speed. The matter involving Mamata Banerjee and the political consulting firm I-PAC travelled through the courts with a pace that caught public attention. Within days, the issue was heard, observations were made, and strong words were used—words that described the situation as a blot on democracy.
Perhaps it was.
But here again, a quieter question follows.
If something is a blot on democracy, does that standard apply universally? Or does it emerge selectively, depending on the case, the context, the moment?
Because across the country, there have been instances—political, administrative, institutional—where similar accusations could be made. Not identical, but comparable in spirit. And yet, not all of them attract the same immediacy, the same language, the same urgency.
This is where the discomfort sharpens.
Not because one case was heard quickly—but because not all are.
Not because one situation was called out strongly—but because others are not.
And this is where the citizen begins to ask a question that is far more difficult than it appears.
Is justice only about correctness?
Or is it also about consistency?
Because consistency is what gives correctness its legitimacy.
Without it, even a correct decision begins to look selective.
And once selectivity enters perception, the mind begins to do something dangerous. It begins to connect dots. It begins to wonder whether ideology, affiliation, or proximity to power influences not the outcome necessarily, but the tone, the urgency, the attention.
These may not be provable in a court of law.
But they are felt outside it.
And what is felt repeatedly begins to shape belief.
There is an old philosophical paradox about a scale that is perfectly balanced in design but uneven in practice. Each time weight is placed, it tilts slightly more in one direction than the other. Not enough to be called broken. Not enough to be rejected. But enough to make the observer hesitate before trusting it completely.
The judiciary today does not stand accused of collapse.
It stands questioned for its unevenness.
And that unevenness is not always in verdicts.
It is in tone.
In timing.
In visibility.
In silence.
Artificial Intelligence does not remove the human touch. It questions its inconsistency.
It asks, quietly but persistently, why justice should feel different in different places.
If the judiciary must remain human, then it must also confront the limits of human memory, human capacity, and human consistency. It must accept that scale has outgrown individual awareness, that complexity has surpassed individual recall.
AI does not weaken judgment.
It strengthens awareness.
And awareness is what transforms variation into conscious choice rather than accidental divergence.
Because divergence itself is not the problem.
Unseen divergence is.
Artificial Intelligence will not solve all of this. It will not eliminate delay. It will not remove bias entirely. It will not replace the human element that remains central to justice. But it can do something foundational—it can create coherence where there is currently fragmentation. It can ensure that when judgments differ, they do so consciously, transparently, and with awareness of the alternatives.
Because the real danger is not difference.
It is unconscious difference.
The kind that accumulates quietly until it begins to define the system itself.
If justice must remain human, then let it be human with memory, human with awareness, human with the humility to recognise that it is part of a larger, interconnected whole. Without that, the defence of the "human touch" begins to sound less like a commitment to empathy and more like a justification for variation.
And variation, when it enters the domain of justice, does not remain harmless for long.
It becomes doubt.
And doubt, when it settles into the public mind, transforms the way the law is experienced. It turns certainty into calculation, principle into probability. It teaches citizens not to trust the system uniformly, but to navigate it strategically.
That is not how justice collapses.
That is how it slowly changes shape.
Until one day, without announcement, without acknowledgment, it begins to depend not on what is right, but on where you stand when you ask for it.
And by then, the system is still standing; but belief has already moved elsewhere.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of THE WEEK.