– Ranjan Solomon
When a judge prays before passing judgment, the prayer may not seem sinister. Faith, after all, is deeply personal. But when the judge in question has decided the most politically charged case in modern India – the Ayodhya dispute – the invocation of divine guidance assumes a troubling hue. It is not just the private faith of an individual; it becomes a public gesture, capable of unsettling the fragile line that separates belief from bias, devotion from duty, and worship from justice.
Justice D.Y. Chandrachud, India’s recently retired Chief Justice, has made two statements that have left many citizens uneasy. The first came in 2024 when, at a public event, he recounted that he had “sat before the deity and told him he needs to find a solution” while adjudicating the Ram Janmabhoomi–Babri Masjid dispute. The second, a year later, described the very construction of the Babri Masjid as a “fundamental act of desecration.” Together, they reveal not merely a personal lapse of judgment but a moral drift in the higher judiciary – a surrender of secular grace to the spirit of the times.
Faith as Intention, Faith as Intervention
It would be unfair to suggest that Justice Chandrachud acted with malice or communal intent. By all accounts, he is a man of faith and a judge with a formidable record on constitutional rights. Yet, the problem lies precisely there: when a liberal jurist invokes divine counsel in relation to a verdict that permanently redefined India’s secular compact, it lends divine legitimacy to what should have remained a strictly constitutional outcome.
The Ayodhya verdict of 2019 was already contentious. It acknowledged that the demolition of the Babri Masjid was illegal, yet handed over the disputed land to the very side responsible for its destruction. It sought to balance faith and law but, in doing so, re-centred faith as the superior moral claim. Justice Chandrachud’s later statement – that he prayed to the deity for a solution – has, therefore, retroactively blurred the distance between the court’s reasoning and a theological resolution.
As retired Justice K. Chandru observed, the comment was “disappointing” because it betrayed the judge’s oath to act without fear or favour, affection or ill will. The Constitution does not require judges to be atheists; it demands that their faith remain irrelevant to the adjudicative process. Justice is not meant to flow from divine inspiration but from evidence, law, and reason.
The Babri Masjid and the Language of Desecration
If the prayer remark revealed sentimentality, the later description of the Babri Masjid’s construction as an “act of desecration” disclosed something more profound: a moral alignment with a narrative that has long sought to justify the mosque’s destruction.
In 2019, the Supreme Court had accepted that the mosque’s demolition was a “blatant violation of the rule of law.” Yet when the same judge, years later, characterises its 16th-century construction as an affront to faith, he effectively endorses the logic that fuelled its demolition in 1992. The shift from legal condemnation to moral justification is subtle but devastating.
The Wire and Scroll both noted the contradiction. If the mosque’s erection was desecration, then its demolition becomes, by extension, an act of rectification. Such theological framing does not belong to a jurist’s vocabulary. It belongs to the polemics of ideology. For a former Chief Justice to echo that language is to risk sanctifying the majoritarian reading of history that the court was supposed to rise above.
The Weight of Secular Oath
At its founding, the Indian republic rested on a delicate faith of its own – the belief that law could contain religion within the bounds of equality and freedom. That equilibrium is now in peril. Across institutions, the line separating personal religiosity from public responsibility is fading. What once belonged to the privacy of conscience now seeps into policy, speech, and jurisprudence.
When the Chief Justice of India prays before the deity of a contested shrine, it sends a message larger than himself: that even the highest constitutional office is not immune to the seductions of piety. This weakens the moral insulation that the judiciary must maintain to be the citizen’s last refuge.
Dr B.R. Ambedkar warned that India’s democracy would fail if religion invaded the domain of politics. He might have added: if religion invades the judiciary, the Constitution itself becomes scripture – sacrosanct yet pliable, interpreted through belief rather than through principle.
From Constitutional Morality to Cultural Nationalism
For years, Chandrachud was seen as the liberal hope of the Supreme Court – the judge who upheld the right to privacy, decriminalised homosexuality, defended press freedom, and spoke movingly of dissent as democracy’s safety valve. His rise to Chief Justice was greeted as a moment of redemption for an institution reeling from executive overreach.
That reputation now lies under a cloud. His remarks mirror the ideological current that has swept through the nation, where nationalism is defined by ritual, and piety becomes patriotism. His words appear to humanise this drift, making it seem less sinister, more spiritual. Yet that very normalisation is what makes them so dangerous.
When reason dons the robe of faith, tyranny learns to speak softly. It is not the loudness of the temple bell but the silence of the Constitution that should worry us. India’s judiciary, once the moral anchor of the republic, risks turning into an echo chamber of national sentiment.
The Public Cost of Private Piety
The Delhi court’s recent decision to impose costs on lawyer Mehmood Pracha, who sought to challenge the Ayodhya verdict citing Chandrachud’s remarks, illustrates the paradox. The court dismissed Pracha’s petition as “frivolous and luxurious litigation,” penalising him ₹6 lakh. Yet, the petition itself emerged from the confusion Chandrachud’s own statements created.
The court rightly found no legal basis to reopen a Supreme Court judgment. But the episode underscores how the judiciary’s moral ambiguity now breeds distrust. When a judge’s speech becomes the subject of litigation, the sanctity of the Bench stands diminished. A single sentence uttered casually can ripple through the public sphere, unsettling faith in the impartiality of the courts.
Judicial Eloquence and Its Burden
Judges often deliver public lectures after retirement, interpreting law through moral reflection. This tradition enriches civic life. But it also carries a burden. Every word from a former Chief Justice reverberates beyond the moment; it becomes part of the archive of the Republic’s conscience.
Justice Chandrachud’s eloquence has often inspired. Yet in speaking of Ayodhya through the language of faith and desecration, he has joined the chorus of cultural nationalism that he once seemed to temper. There is a lesson here about how easily liberal symbolism can be co-opted by the prevailing order.
Faith may comfort an individual, but it cannot heal a divided nation. The duty of a judge is not to pray for resolution but to reason toward it: to make justice appear not divine, but humanly possible.
A Crisis Larger Than One Man
This is not merely about Chandrachud. His contradictions mirror a larger fatigue of conscience that has settled over Indian democracy. Once, the judiciary dared to rebuke power; today, it seeks accommodation. The language of faith provides convenient refuge – a vocabulary that pleases the powerful and soothes the public.
But justice that leans on faith ceases to be justice. It becomes arbitration between gods, not citizens. When judges invoke the divine, they replace the authority of the Constitution with the moral comfort of religion. That shift, once begun, is hard to reverse.
The challenge now is not to vilify one judge but to recover the secular imagination of Indian jurisprudence – to remember that the Constitution itself is the only sacred text that binds us all, believers and non-believers alike.
Reclaiming the Idea of Justice
India’s future will not depend on temples built or mosques lost, but on whether the courts can still speak truth to power without bending to cultural majoritarianism. The judiciary’s moral strength lies not in shared belief but in shared restraint. It must be seen to rise above the passions of the day.
When judges pray for solutions instead of reasoning toward them, they signal despair in the law itself. The Republic cannot afford such despair. What India needs is not a praying judge but a thinking one – rooted in empathy, guided by evidence, and loyal only to the Constitution.
To stand between the Bench and the Temple is to choose between the promise of justice and the comfort of faith. Justice Chandrachud’s words, perhaps unintentionally, remind us how thin that line has become.
The Silence That Follows the Verdict
The Ayodhya verdict is now part of history, but its moral reverberations continue. What we have lost is not just a mosque or a plot of land, but the moral equilibrium of the judiciary. When faith enters the courtroom, secularism leaves by the side door.
The drift of India’s judiciary is not inevitable; it is the consequence of human frailty – the desire to reconcile personal belief with public duty. Yet democracy demands that its judges resist this urge. For when justice bows before the altar, truth no longer stands upright.
[Ranjan Solomon is a political commentator and rights advocate who writes on justice, democracy, and decolonisation.]
