In Samuel Beckett’s seminal absurdist play Waiting for Godot, two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, stand beside a barren tree on a deserted country road, engaged in endless, highly structured dialogue while awaiting a mysterious figure who never arrives. They pace, they deliberate, they check their pocket watches. Yet, nothing changes. "Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful," Estragon famously laments.
On the afternoon of October 15, as Chief Justice of India (CJI) Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi rose after navigating 46 petitions related to the protests against the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) and the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, one could not help but sense a similar absurdist spectacle unfolding inside Court 1.
The Bench performed every motion of grand judicial stewardship. It issued notices, appointed nodal counsel, requested sealed covers and ordered law enforcement to preserve CCTV footage.
Yet, beneath this flurry of administrative activity, the reality on the ground remained entirely static. The SIR exercise rolls on, Jantar Mantar remains de-notified as a protest site and the executive secured the one currency it values above all else - time.
To the seasoned court observer, the Bench’s approach carries a ready-made defence. Is it not standard practice for the master of the roster to centralise connected petitions to prevent contradictory orders across different benches? After all, since the street blockades and police actions were born out of the anti-SIR protests, shouldn't Court 1 hold the reins?
This argument sounds plausible, but it conflates two fundamentally distinct judicial duties - long-term constitutional adjudication and immediate, emergency relief.
The writ petition challenging the validity of the SIR, filed by Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi and ten INDIA bloc leaders, rightfully belongs before the CJI.
But the remaining 40-odd petitions concerned fundamental, time-sensitive civil liberties: lawyers allegedly battered while in police detention, journalists whose electronic equipment was confiscated and citizens detained under provisions like Section 172 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS).
By retaining every single file under its own roof, Court 1 did not preserve order; it created a bottleneck. Instead of allowing three or four independent division benches to immediately interrogate police excesses or issue protective orders, every emergency was funneled into a single, slow-moving queue. Immediate constitutional protections were traded for a long-form evidentiary archiving exercise.
To understand how the current crisis descended into existential farce, one must strip away the legalese and look at the spirit of the law.
In March 2023, a five-judge Constitution Bench delivered a landmark ruling in Anoop Baranwal v. Union of India. The Court’s core ruling was simple: free and fair elections cannot exist if the referees (Election Commissioners) are handpicked exclusively by the ruling party. To prevent executive dominance, the Court created a selection committee comprising the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition and the Chief Justice of India.
The Court explicitly stated that this was a temporary fix until parliament enacted a law under Article 324(2). The intent was unmistakable - any future law passed by parliament had to preserve institutional neutrality. And parliament did make a law. However, in doing so, it seized upon the word "interim" while completely discarding the judgment's underlying sentiment. While passing the Chief Election Commissioner and Other Election Commissioners Act, 2023, parliament replaced the Chief Justice on the panel with a Union cabinet minister nominated by the Prime Minister. It was under this contested law that CEC Gyanesh Kumar was appointed.
Under the guise of "following the Court’s directive to make a law," the executive gave statutory permanence to the exact monopoly the Court had condemned. With two government votes against one opposition vote, the Leader of the Opposition was reduced to what Justice Dipankar Datta would later characterise as an "ornamental" spectator.
When this statutory manoeuver was challenged in Dr. Jaya Thakur v. Union of India, the Supreme Court would consider whether the matter should be heard by a larger bench. In doing so, its internal divide exposed the depth of this absurdist loop.
Justice Datta saw through the executive’s strategy. He forcefully rejected the Solicitor General’s attempt to draw parallels between the executive’s selection process and the Collegium, pointing out that the judiciary is often left "playing second fiddle" in appointments anyway. Justice Datta held that Anoop Baranwal had already established the mandate to insulate the ECI from exclusive executive control. To him, no reference to a larger bench was needed; the law clearly violated the Constitution's basic structure.
Justice Satish Chandra Sharma, however, offered a different reading. Accepting the Solicitor General’s argument on the separation of powers, he held that whether parliament can exclude a neutral third party like the CJI was a novel, substantial question of constitutional interpretation. Under Article 145(3), he insisted that the matter must be referred to a five-judge Constitution Bench.
Here is where the absurdity peaks. Both judges recognised that reference cases linger endlessly in the Supreme Court and explicitly urged the CJI to form a permanent bench for references. Yet, that request itself remains frozen in administrative limbo. A recall petition pointing out a potential conflict of interest - highlighting that Justice Sharma's son serves as standing counsel for the ECI - also remains unaddressed.
Relying on an earlier Supreme Court observation that permitted requesting additional verification documents during the SIR, the ECI unilaterally modified Form 6 - a substantive change that legally requires parliamentary sanction and judicial oversight.
Under Rule 26 of the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960, Form 6 is a statutory document. Amending it or attaching mandatory new declarations is a substantive legislative act that strictly requires parliamentary notification and formal executive rule-making procedures. Yet, the ECI appended a mandatory new online self-declaration - requiring first-time voters to produce legacy proof of their parents' citizenship prior to 1987 and making Aadhaar linkage a mandatory prerequisite - misinterpreting the Court's ruling as a blanket judicial blessing to rewrite statutory enrolment criteria on the fly.
One can't help but be reminded of Eugene Ionesco’s absurdist play Rhinoceros, where citizens gradually accept the bizarre, grotesque transformation of their peers into horned beasts simply because authority dictates it - a metamorphosis normalised through sheer bureaucratic indifference.
The ECI’s Form 6 move carries a similar aura of unbothered audacity: bypassing both parliament and the full Commission to twist a judicial precedent into a license for unilateral rule-making, altering the very threshold of franchise while the citizenry looks on in dazed compliance.
When this administrative usurpation reached Court 1 earlier in October, the Bench explicitly called out the ECI's bluff, clarifying, "Any modified Form 6 has not been approved by us," and demanding records to establish "who modified what".
Yet, in a twist that would make Ionesco nod in quiet recognition, the Court stayed neither the modified Form nor the ongoing SIR exercise.
Meanwhile, Section 16 of the 2023 Act, which grants serving and former Commissioners blanket statutory immunity from civil and criminal proceedings for official acts, remains completely operational. The referee operates with total statutory immunity while the Court grants the government time to file counter-affidavits.
In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was condemned by the Gods to roll an immense boulder up a steep mountain, only to watch it inevitably roll back down to the bottom the moment it reached the peak - a punishment of eternal, futile labour.
In his profound philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus argued that human existence is defined by this exact struggle against absurdity: the urge to find meaning in an inherently indifferent universe. Camus famously concluded that "one must imagine Sisyphus happy" because the conscious struggle itself gives life purpose.
On October 15, the litigants, lawyers and journalists who crowded Court 1 played their part in this Sisyphean drama. They filed their petitions, presented their photographs and cited landmark precedents on civil liberties. In return, the Court rolled the boulder back down the hill. It asked for counter-affidavits, appointed nodal counsel and scheduled another date.
By prioritising administrative order over immediate interim relief, Court 1 simply managed the docket. It offered the appearance of action without the burden of a decision. And as the Bench rose at 1:56 PM, the citizens and journalists left Court 1 with little more than a filing number, still waiting for their Godot.