A bit much, no, my lordships? The debate over SC’s lifetime ban on academics in NCERT row

Earlier this week, Supreme Court imposed a 'lifetime ban' on three academics from undertaking any work connected with government or GoI-aided educational institutions. This follows the kerfuffle that followed a Class 8 NCERT textbook chapter that discussed 'judicial corruption', a notion the court believed to be too corrosive for impressionable minds.

The judges may have smelt a conspiracy to undermine the judicial system. It also directed GoI to identify and act against individuals who circulated or endorsed the disputed material on social media, describing them as 'mischief-mongers' spreading harmful narratives about the judiciary. A bit too much, no, lordships?

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The court had already directed that all copies of the book be withdrawn from public access. In practical terms, it addressed the immediate concern and nipped it in the bud. Blacklisting of the three writers, however, smacks of the kind of disproportionality many pre-Independence Indians were familiar with when dealing with a hypersensitive colonial system.

Academic content, especially in the social sciences, is often debated, revised and duly corrected through institutional processes. These measures preserve accountability, without sending out an unfortunate - and surely unintended - message of 'toe the narrative, else'. The message of a line having been crossed was served by pulling out the book. Was there also a need to send the writers to Kaalapani?

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Courts guard institutional credibility of the judiciary. Yet, credibility is strengthened not only by protecting reputation, but also by demonstrating how that reputation is built and maintained. By extending the matter from textbook correction to professional exclusion, we enter a punitive, not corrective, terrain.