Senior Advocate Sudeep Pasbola has spent more than three decades defending clients in some of Maharashtra’s most closely watched criminal trials. Now he is raising alarms about what he sees as a troubling shift in the state’s justice system. In a wide-ranging interview, the Chairperson of the Bar Council of Maharashtra and Goa explained why he believes judicial independence is eroding and what he thinks the profession must fix.
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The Press and the Courts
Pasbola’s most pointed comments concerned the relationship between the media and the judiciary. “When the press lost its independence, the judiciary lost its biggest support,” he said. “Once the press was muzzled and brought under government control, the judiciary lost its way.” He argued that courts must display independence, but that independence is now in gradual decline.
The lawyer traced the shift to broader political changes. From Independence until the 1980s, he said, there was a balance between the judiciary and parliament. After the Emergency ended, personal liberty and citizens’ rights under Articles 21 and 14 became central concerns. Courts took the lead and the balance tilted in their favor. That continued until around 2016.
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Trials, Publicity, and Fairness
Pasbola also addressed how high-profile cases have changed over his career. He does not seek publicity and has never discussed a client’s case in the media. Yet he acknowledged that public sentiment does affect court decisions to some extent. “The Advocates Act bars advocates from engaging in publicity, but in an era where social and electronic media are so powerful, it is time to amend the Advocates Act to allow a limited degree of publicity,” he said.
He described how media attention makes all participants in a trial over-cautious. “Judges become very conscious because the media watches them closely. In some ways, this causes prejudice to the accused.” He also noted that the press tends to champion the victim’s cause while the accused’s narrative gets lost. Courts tend to favor victims and complainants rather than focusing on whether the accused is guilty, he said.
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Pasbola said the core problem is not merely delay in individual cases but a system overburdened with matters unable to dispose of them in a time-bound manner. “Whenever there is a gap, concentration and thought processes are disturbed, which leads to mistakes. When a trial proceeds in continuity, performance is always better.”
