Delhi is not India and India is not Delhi: Supreme Court Justice Aravind Kumar says Delhi lawyers aren't superior

Supreme Court Justice Aravind Kumar recently said that Delhi is not India and India is not Delhi. He described the long-standing glorification of Delhi as misplaced and rooted in its status as the capital, the seat of the Supreme Court and a hub for high-value and high-visibility litigation.

He termed the perception that Delhi represents the highest form of legal practice in India as false and institutionally reinforced.

“...an impression has been cultivated that Delhi is the natural pinnacle of legal ability in India. That impression is utterly false. It is institutionally produced, commercially amplified and socially repeated, but false nonetheless.”

The Supreme Court judge was speaking at a seminar on Artificial Intelligence: Prevention and Resolution of Disputes held in Bengaluru.

Justice Kumar said that Delhi’s importance does not translate into superiority within the legal system and that a hierarchy of forums does not create a hierarchy of minds. He added that the fact that certain disputes culminate in Delhi does not mean legal excellence begins there.

The concentration of final court practice, national tribunals and high-value sectors in the capital does not justify treating one metropolitan circuit as a superior legal class or expecting the rest of the country to merely follow.

"This attitude must go," he added.

Justice Kumar rejected the idea that proximity to the capital determines professional worth and emphasised that there is no constitutional basis for treating one legal centre as superior.

“There is no constitutional caste system among Bars. There is no doctrine by which a lawyer acquires greater intrinsic worth by proximity to the capital,” the judge added.

He said that metropolitan legal culture was not the be-all and end-all of Indian dispute resolution.

"What is often projected as superiority is, in truth, a by-product of litigation hierarchy, institutional concentration, visibility and pricing power. It should not be mistaken for a monopoly of merit,” he emphasised.

He opined that Indian law is not manufactured in Delhi and distributed to the rest of the country. It is argued, shaped, tested and developed across India.

This includes High Courts, district courts, tribunals, commercial courts, arbitral institutions and capable Bars that may not have the same visibility but are equally serious and important to the legal system, he pointed out.

"The Indian legal system draws its intelligence from the whole Republic, not from one city alone," he added.

He also raised concerns about the impact of artificial intelligence on the legal profession and warned that reliance on Delhi-centric data could reinforce existing hierarchies instead of democratising access.

Justice Kumar cautioned that such systems could hard-code metropolitan bias into the future and said that this must not happen.

He concluded that a legal future shaped by narrow and city-centric data cannot reflect India’s constitutional reality as a diverse, federal, multilingual and institutionally distributed republic.