On October 12, as the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) marked its 33rd Foundation Day. Its Chairperson, Justice V Ramasubramanian, described the office of the Chief Justice of India as one put to an agni pariksha (trial by fire) every minute, and “not necessarily by sacred souls”.
Chief Justice Surya Kant offered a line that deserves to outlive the occasion: if the Constitution is the promise, the Commission is one of its keepers.
It is a fine line. It also raises an uncomfortable question. Who ensures that the keeper is fit to keep?
The question is not academic. Between November 9 and 20, the Sub-Committee on Accreditation of the Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions (GANHRI) will decide whether the NHRC keeps the ‘A’ status it has held since 1999. In 2025, the Sub-Committee recommended a downgrade to ‘B’. The Commission’s challenge was rejected in December. The concerns on record are familiar: an opaque appointment process, thin pluralism and gender representation, the government’s power to post a senior civil servant as Secretary-General and police officers investigating complaints against the police. The Commission is entitled to answer each of these. But the answer will be judged by reform, not rhetoric.
It would not trigger sanctions or touch trade. Its price is voice and standing. An ‘A’-status institution may speak in its own right at the UN Human Rights Council and take full part in GANHRI, with the right to vote and hold office. A ‘B’-status institution may attend, but largely as an observer. The grade measures the independence of an institution, not the human rights record of a nation. Abroad, however, it will be read as both. The world’s most populous democracy, which rightly seeks a seat at the high table, would find its national rights institution seated at the side. Critics would cite it in every forum and each time an Indian diplomat defended the country’s record, the downgrade would be the first footnote in the reply.
Strip away the Geneva vocabulary and the stakes are simple. Picture a daily-wage labourer who returns injured from a police station in a district town. His family cannot afford a lawyer and is hundreds of kilometres from the nearest High Court. What it can do is send a complaint to a human rights commission. For that family, the commission is the Constitution in working clothes. If no investigator is free for months, if a member’s post lies vacant, or if a recommendation of compensation gathers dust in a departmental file, Article 21 has been promised but not delivered.
The Protection of Human Rights Act, 1993 is more ambitious than its reputation. The Commission may inquire on its own motion, visit jails, intervene in court proceedings and, under Section 18, recommend compensation and prosecution or approach the Supreme Court or a High Court. Governments must report the action taken within a month. Yet, two weaknesses run through the statute.
The first is money. Under Section 32, the Commission receives such sums by way of grants as the Central government “may think fit”. An institution whose task is to scrutinise the executive is funded at the executive’s discretion. That is precisely the vulnerability the UN’s Paris Principles warn against. The same pattern governs leadership: Section 11 requires the Central government to make available an officer of the rank of Secretary to the Government of India as the Commission’s Secretary-General, who under Section 3(4) is its Chief Executive Officer. The chief executive of the watchdog is, in effect, on loan from those it watches.
The second is follow-through. A recommendation is not a decree and the law on its binding force is unsettled. A Full Bench of the Madras High Court held in 2021 that a State commission’s recommendations bind the government, subject to judicial review. Other courts have been less definite. Uncertainty is where recommendations go to die.
This is where the constitutional courts come in, with care. The Supreme Court has walked this road before. In DK Basu, while monitoring its directions on custodial violence, it directed States to constitute State Human Rights Commissions and fill vacancies. In All India Judges’ Association, it accepted that directions with financial implications may issue when an institution cannot otherwise perform its constitutional function. It has taken suo motu cognisance of vacancies and poor infrastructure in consumer commissions. If a consumer forum deserves a working office, a body that guards life and liberty deserves no less.
The courts also know the limits. Appropriation is for Parliament and the judiciary has repeatedly cautioned itself against running the executive. So the court should not write a budget. What it can do, through a suo motu continuing mandamus of the kind used in Vineet Narain, is insist on three things: disclosure, timelines and reasons. Let the Union and the States place on affidavit their sanctioned and vacant posts, the budgets the commissions sought against what they received, the fate of every Section 18 recommendation, and the status of Human Rights Courts under Section 30. Then let them file time-bound plans and explain every shortfall. Sunlight, not substitution, is the judicial tool.
None of this is a brief against the government. A strong commission is cheap insurance. It settles grievances before they become litigation, flags systemic failures before they become scandals and lends India a credible voice in international forums. The reforms are modest: publish the selection process and shortlists; fill posts before they fall vacant; amend Section 11 so that the Commission selects its own Secretary-General; build an investigative cadre of its own, with clear recusal rules, so that police officers are not asked to sit in judgment over colleagues; and place complaints, timelines and compliance on a public dashboard. Some of this needs an amendment to the Act; none of it needs an amendment to the Constitution. All of it needs will.
Justice Ramasubramanian’s sharpest warning was that rights are now threatened by more than the State. Algorithms decide who receives welfare; personal data is harvested and traded; heatwaves and floods fall hardest on the poor. The Supreme Court has recognised privacy as a fundamental right in Puttaswamy and, in MK Ranjitsinh (2024), a right against the adverse effects of climate change. A commission built for the problems of 1993 cannot police the harms of 2026. It needs dedicated cells for digital rights and climate harm, staffed by technologists and scientists as well as lawyers.
A trial by fire is not a calamity. It is a chance to show what an institution is made of. The NHRC will face one in Geneva next month, but it faces one every day in police lock-ups, prisons and flood-hit villages. The government can pass that test by funding the Commission and freeing it. The Commission can pass it by acting without fear. And the courts can ensure, with restraint and with resolve, that the keeper of the constitutional promise is never left empty-handed.
E Vijay Anand is an Advocate practising at the Madras High Court.
Views are personal.