When faith turns to fury: The attack on the Chief Justice of India and the peril to the Republic

In any constitutional democracy, the judge’s chair is meant to be the still point in a turning world — a space where reason prevails over rage and law over impulse. On October 6, 2025, that space was momentarily disturbed in India’s Supreme Court.

An advocate attempted to throw a shoe at Chief Justice of India BR Gavai. Swift intervention by court security prevented the act from succeeding and the lawyer was promptly escorted out. As he left, his words made the motive unmistakable:

“Sanatan ka apman nahi sahenge” [Will not tolerate any disrespect to Sanatan].

In that brief, charged moment, the assault on a person became an assault on the very institution he represents and, by extension, on the constitutional order itself.

It was not merely a display of poor temperament. It was a declaration of contempt for the very idea of constitutional civility. The shoe did not strike the Chief Justice, but it struck something far more fragile — public faith in institutions.

And yet, with the composure of a bhikkhu, Chief Justice Gavai brushed aside the commotion and continued the day’s hearings. That single gesture — quiet, unflinching and dignified — might turn out to be more powerful than any sermon on “judicial restraint.”

Across the Atlantic, another symbol of judicial dignity was similarly tested. In South Carolina, Circuit Court Judge Diane Goodstein’s home was gutted in a suspected arson attack. Her husband and son were grievously injured. Judge Goodstein had recently issued an injunction curbing a politically sensitive transfer of voter data to the Trump administration.

Whether the attack was accidental or deliberate remains under investigation, but the questions it raises are chillingly familiar. Who benefits when judges are turned into targets? When violence against judges becomes the language of politics, democracy itself is speaking in tongues.

The Indian incident cannot be viewed in isolation. Chief Justice Gavai’s remark — in response to a publicity-interest petition to restore an idol of Lord Vishnu at Khajuraho — was a moment of judicial irony, not insult. “Go and ask the deity himself to do something,” CJI said. He later clarified, “I respect all religions” and that he firmly trusts in “true secularism,” putting the quietus on a controversy.

That clarification was buried under a deluge of orchestrated outrage. The Chief Justice’s words were twisted into sacrilege; his identity as a Dalit jurist became an unspoken target. The malicious mischief that followed was not spontaneous. It was cultivated - fertilised by months of rhetoric that treats every institution as an adversary and every disagreement as blasphemy. The self-appointed guardians of Sanatana Dharma claim they act to defend eternal values. But when defence turns to desecration, when devotion becomes an excuse for assault, we are not defending faith; we are weaponising it.

And this, tragically, mirrors the very intolerance that some political leaders decry when the boot is on the other foot. Recall how in 2023, Tamil Nadu’s Deputy Chief Minister Udhayanidhi Stalin spoke at a conference on the eradication of Sanatana Dharma. His analogy — comparing regressive practices to malaria and dengue — ignited a storm. Multiple FIRs were filed across States and his plea to club them is still pending before the Supreme Court. The same voices that demanded his prosecution now justify, or at least excuse, the attack on Chief Justice Gavai. Hypocrisy has rarely been so symmetrical.

A true democracy cannot survive if religion is permitted to police the judiciary. The court’s role is not to comfort every conscience; it is to interpret the law, however unsettling the result.

India’s constitutional morality - to borrow Dr BR Ambedkar’s phrase - rests not on graded order, but on realisation of socialism actuated by feelings of equality and fraternity and, above all, justice. When the Chief Justice, himself a follower of Ambedkar’s thought, defends the right to question authority, he does so as custodian of a secular state. When a devotee hurls a shoe in response, he acts as an emissary of a theocratic impulse. Between those two acts lies the chasm between republic and mobocracy.

Chief Justice Gavai’s jurisprudence has consistently affirmed the primacy of due process. In his 2024 judgment on “bulldozer justice,” he reminded the executive that houses cannot be razed merely because the occupant has been accused of a crime. He reaffirmed that even accused have a right to shelter under Article 21. To the authoritarian mind, such restraint appears as weakness. To the constitutional mind, it is strength. 

What makes these incidents - the shoe in Delhi and the fire in South Carolina - so unnerving is not only their violence, but their normalisation. They are the predictable outcomes of a politics that treats the judiciary as a hurdle, journalists as irritants and minorities as expendable.

When daily discourse drips with contempt for institutions, when the judiciary is caricatured as partisan or “anti-faith,” it takes only a spark - or a slogan - for violence to follow.

A democracy dies not when its Constitution is repealed, but when its institutions are ridiculed into irrelevance. It brings to mind former Additional Chief Election Commissioner R Balakrishnan’s warning: “The death of institutions — a catastrophe!”

Political leadership, therefore, bears the first responsibility. In India, it is not enough for leaders to mutter that “emotions ran high.” The political leaders must state unambiguously that any attack on the judiciary is an attack on the Republic. Silence in such moments is not neutrality; it is abdication.

Similarly, in the United States, Trump, who once derided judges as “Obama judges”, must learn that words can build bonfires. When a judge’s home burns, even metaphor becomes literal.

In both nations, leaders must realise that institutional respect is indivisible: one cannot demand obedience from the Bench on Monday and impugn its integrity on Tuesday.

The legal fraternity, too, must look inward. An advocate who throws a shoe at a judge disgraces not only himself, but the gown he wears. The Bar Council’s prompt suspension is welcome, but the profession must go further, cultivating in its ranks a culture of reason, not rage.

And as citizens, we must remember: judges are not infallible, but they are indispensable. We may disagree, even protest, but never degrade. To judge the decision is our right; to assault the judge is our ruin.

From Washington to New Delhi, from Khajuraho to Charleston, the message is the same: when the bench becomes a battlefield, democracy itself is in retreat. 

Chief Justice Gavai’s calm composure and Judge Goodstein’s quiet courage remind us that the rule of law survives not by the absence of attacks, but by the refusal to yield to them.

Let us therefore be clear - the shoe, the slogan, the fire are not isolated spasms of anger. They are symptoms of a larger disease: the corrosion of constitutional faith.

And unless those who claim to defend Sanatana - or any other creed - learn to respect the secular sanctity of the Bench, the eternal will not endure. Because when a judge is struck, it is not the man or the woman who bleeds. It is the Republic itself.

Dhileepan Pakutharivu is an advocate practicing before the Madras High Court.

The views expressed here are solely personal and should not be attributed in any manner to any professional institutions that the author is affiliated.