The first principle of any constitutional democracy is almost axiomatic: judicial determinations are assailed through appellate review, not through orchestrated campaigns of intimidation. A judgment belongs in a court of law, vendetta nowhere. Yet the sustained campaign directed against Additional District and Sessions Judge Tabassum Khan following her verdict in the Barakheda lynching case compels us to confront a disquieting constitutional reality.

The issue has grown beyond the correctness of a criminal conviction to whether judicial independence can survive vilification, communal targeting and overt threats for discharging their constitutional obligations.

Whether Judge Khan's conclusions are ultimately affirmed, modified or set aside is, in jurisprudential terms, entirely beside the point. The Indian legal system is founded upon a carefully calibrated appellate architecture precisely because every judicial determination remains open to scrutiny.

Audi alteram partem and appellate review constitute indispensable components of due process. What constitutionalism emphatically does not recognise is the substitution of legal challenge with intimidation, communal mobilisation or digital vigilantism. That distinction marks the boundary between the rule of law and the rule of the mob.

Judge Khan performed the quintessential judicial function. She evaluated the corpus of evidence before her and applied the governing principles of criminal jurisprudence. If errors of law or appreciation of evidence exist, they fall within the exclusive province of the appellate courts.

What transpired thereafter represents something profoundly more troubling than ordinary criticism. The judicial reasoning receded into the background; the judge's personal identity assumed centre stage. Communal invective displaced legal argument. Such a transformation is antithetical to every norm of constitutional adjudication.

The Madhya Pradesh High Court deserves commendation for promptly invoking its suo motu jurisdiction to safeguard the institutional integrity of the subordinate judiciary. Likewise, the Supreme Court Advocates-on-Record Association was entirely correct in reiterating that judicial orders are challenged through appellate remedies rather than intimidation.

Judicial independence is not preserved solely through constitutional text. It survives because every constitutional organ—the executive, the police, the prosecutorial apparatus, the Bar, the media and civil society—internalises the constitutional ethic that intimidation of judges is intolerable irrespective of ideology, identity or political convenience.

Institutional silence, in such circumstances, is never value-neutral. Silence acquires the character of tacit acquiescence. The executive consequently bears a heightened responsibility. Threats directed at judicial officers cannot be dismissed as episodic law-and-order disturbances. The coercive apparatus of the State exists inter alia to preserve the conditions under which constitutional adjudication may occur without fear or favour.

Equally, the police cannot respond to explicit criminal intimidation with diffidence or selective enforcement. The Bar, as an indispensable stakeholder in the administration of justice, cannot calibrate its defence of judicial independence according to ideological sympathies or political expediency.

To be sure, judicial decisions are not beyond criticism. Robust critique, forensic legal analysis and rigorous public debate are necessitated. Indeed, constitutional morality demands informed scrutiny of judicial reasoning. But there exists an unbridgeable conceptual distinction between criticism of judgments and persecution of judges.