Every democracy, at some point, has to answer the same question: who watches the institutions that watch the elections? India has been circling that question since 2023. On 23 September, the Supreme Court gave it a split answer.
Two judges heard petitions challenging the 2023 law that removed the Chief Justice of India from the panel that appoints the Chief Election Commissioner and Election Commissioners, replacing him with a Union Cabinet Minister. Justice Dipankar Datta saw no need for a Constitution Bench; the governing principles, he held, were already settled, and he put on record some pointed questions about how the government had used the trust placed in it. Justice Satish Chandra Sharma disagreed, holding the question needed a larger bench. They were, in Justice Datta's own words, "divided in our opinion."
The papers now sit with Chief Justice Surya Kant.
I have spent some time with this story, and I think it is one of the more important things this court has been handed this decade, not because of what the bench said, but because of what the underlying question demands. The 2023 Anoop Baranwal judgment set an interim panel with the CJI on it and told Parliament to make a law. Parliament made one, without the CJI. Whether that law insulates the Election Commission from the executive or, in Justice Datta's phrase, merely "recalibrates executive control" is exactly what a Constitution Bench should settle, with the full weight of the institution behind the answer.
September was also the month the Supreme Court questioned the Bar Council's power to cap the age at which someone may study law, and the month new rules arrived for how e-commerce platforms may show you prices and search results. Quiet developments, important consequences.
This issue covers all of it. The split verdict gets the cover, because it is the story that will matter longest.