On Thursday, the Bar Council of India told every state bar council in the country not to enrol a single 2026 graduate of NALSAR University of Law as an advocate, until further notice. By that evening, the order had been withdrawn. In the space of a few hours, an entire graduating class of one of India’s most respected law schools went from being collectively barred from practising their profession to being cleared entirely, with the regulator itself conceding that the “vast majority” of them were innocent and should not suffer for the alleged conduct of a few.
That reversal should be read as good news. It should also be read as a warning about how easily the country’s apex legal regulator was willing to punish an entire class in the first place.
What actually triggered this
The order traces back to a dispute over Chief Justice of India Surya Kant’s proposed participation as chief guest at NALSAR’s upcoming convocation. A section of students wrote to the university’s Vice-Chancellor, Registrar and faculty objecting to the invitation. BCI chairman Manan Kumar Mishra — who also sits in the Rajya Sabha as a BJP member — responded by directing every state bar council to freeze enrolment for the entire 2026 batch while the BCI “examined allegations” about a campaign against the CJI’s participation, with a final decision promised for August 19.
Set aside, for a moment, whether objecting to a chief guest is itself objectionable. What should trouble anyone who cares about due process is the mismatch between the alleged offence and the punishment. A subset of students wrote a letter of protest to their own university administration — a fairly ordinary act of student advocacy, the kind that happens on campuses across the country every year over speaker invitations, honorary degrees and convocation guests. The BCI’s response was to freeze the professional futures of an entire graduating class, none of whom had been individually named, charged, or given any opportunity to respond, based on the actions of an unspecified few.
Collective punishment is not a technicality
There is a meaningful difference between disciplining specific students for specific conduct, after some process establishing what they actually did, and freezing an entire class’s ability to practise law because some unidentified subset of them wrote a letter the chairman found objectionable. The first is ordinary institutional accountability. The second is collective punishment — treating an entire cohort as suspect because a few of its members exercised what is, on the face of it, a fairly unremarkable form of protest.
This distinction is not a legal technicality. A law degree from an institution like NALSAR represents years of work, and enrolment as an advocate is the gateway to an entire career. Freezing that gateway for hundreds of graduates who had nothing to do with the letter — because identifying the actual authors was apparently too much trouble in the first 24 hours — is precisely the kind of disproportionate response the legal profession is supposed to guard against, not practise on its own students.
The reversal is not the same as accountability
It is worth crediting the BCI for reversing course as quickly as it did, rather than letting the freeze stand while a slower process ground on. Public pressure worked, and worked fast. But a reversal triggered by social media backlash is a different thing from an institution that got its process right the first time. If the uproar had been smaller, or slower to build, there is no clear reason to think Thursday’s order would have been walked back before real damage was done — bar enrolment delayed, job offers jeopardised, months lost to a freeze imposed on people never individually accused of anything.
That is the deeper problem this episode exposes. A statutory body with genuine disciplinary power over who gets to practise law reached first for the broadest possible instrument — freezing an entire class — rather than the narrower one: identifying the specific students involved, if any wrongdoing is even established, and addressing them individually. The fact that it corrected itself within hours is reassuring only up to a point. It still tells every law student in the country that a regulator responsible for their professional future is willing to treat an entire graduating class as collectively liable for a letter it hadn’t even finished investigating.
What should follow
The BCI has said a final decision on the underlying matter will come on August 19. Whatever that decision says, it should apply only to students who can actually be shown to have organised or led the campaign against the CJI’s invitation — not to an entire batch, and not as a default setting reached for under pressure and abandoned just as quickly once the pressure reversed direction. Due process should not depend on how loudly the internet objects.
— Daily Archives Editorial Desk