The Sound of Applause: When diagnosis becomes a substitute for reform

Justice Ujjal Bhuyan's recent remarks on the Indian judiciary deserved the attention they received.

His criticism of former Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi's acceptance of a Rajya Sabha nomination articulated a discomfort that many had quietly felt for years. His reminder that justice delayed is justice denied drew equally enthusiastic applause.
I agreed with almost everything he said.
Yet I came away with an unexpected sense of dissatisfaction.
Not because the diagnosis was wrong.
But because I found myself wondering whether our public life has become remarkably good at diagnosing institutional failure while steadily losing interest in institutional repair.
Take the familiar maxim: justice delayed is justice denied.

Who in India does not know this already?
Certainly not the litigant who has spent years waiting for a verdict.
Certainly not the undertrial prisoner whose liberty has been suspended more by procedure than by conviction.
Certainly not lawyers living through endless adjournments or judges struggling under impossible caseloads.
The existence of delay is not the mystery.
Its persistence is.

The more interesting questions begin where the slogan ends.
Of course, no single judge can redesign India's judicial system in one speech. Nor should we expect one to.
But there is a difference between recognising a problem and beginning a serious conversation about how one's own institution contributes to it. Public life increasingly stops at the first stage.
Diagnosis has become an end in itself.

The same thought occurred to me while listening to Justice Bhuyan's criticism of Justice Gogoi.
Whether one agrees with that criticism or not, institutions are rarely transformed by identifying symbolic failures alone. They are transformed by examining the culture that made those failures possible.
One controversial appointment does not explain institutional decline.
Nor does one courageous speech reverse it.
Institutions change more quietly than that.
They change when ordinary habits change.

When professional expectations change.
When people begin asking not merely what went wrong, but what they themselves have quietly tolerated.
That kind of conversation attracts far less applause.
Perhaps because it asks something of the audience as well.
Over the past year, I have found myself returning repeatedly to the same pattern.
Whether discussing examination scandals, politics, medicine, journalism, academia or social media, our instinct is remarkably consistent.

Find the villain. Condemn the villain. Applaud the person who condemns the villain. Then leave reassured that something important has happened.
Usually, very little has.
I sometimes think of this as moral theatre.
Not because those participating are insincere. Most are entirely sincere.
Its limitation lies elsewhere.
Moral theatre identifies wrongdoing. Moral repair asks why otherwise respectable institutions repeatedly produce the same kinds of wrongdoing.

The first changes the conversation. The second changes the culture.
Perhaps this explains one of the paradoxes of our age.
Doctors speak of compassion while wrestling with the pressures of modern healthcare. Journalists defend truth while navigating an attention economy that rewards outrage. Universities celebrate academic freedom while struggling with conformity and mediocrity. Politicians invoke ethics while operating within systems that often reward expediency. Judges speak movingly about constitutional morality.

Every profession knows how to describe its ideals. Far fewer know how to reform themselves.
Public speeches matter. Indeed, it is significant when someone within an institution chooses candour over comfortable silence.
But candour is only the beginning.
A speech becomes transformative when it encourages an institution to ask not simply what another individual did wrong, but what it must now do differently itself.
That requires a different kind of courage.

Not merely the courage to speak. The courage to examine. The courage to question professional habits. The courage to disturb arrangements from which one's own institution may benefit.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn famously wrote that the line dividing good and evil passes not between classes, parties or nations, but through every human heart.
Perhaps something similar is true of institutions.

The line separating integrity from decay does not run neatly between Justice Bhuyan and Justice Gogoi, between those who speak and those who remain silent, or between the stage and the audience.

It runs through every profession. Every institution. And, uncomfortably, through every one of us.
Until our speeches begin to cross that line, applause may remain the easiest part of reform.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of India Today NE or its affiliates)