NALSAR Graduating Class Objects to CJI Surya Kant as Chief Guest, Citing His “Don’t Waste My Time” Remark
(By Syed Ali Taher Abedi)
Hyderabad, August 10, 2026-In a development that has placed one of India’s most prestigious national law universities at the centre of a constitutional and institutional controversy, the graduating batch of the National Academy of Legal Studies and Research at Hyderabad has formally petitioned the university’s Vice-Chancellor, Registrar, and faculty to reconsider the proposed invitation of Chief Justice of India Surya Kant as the chief guest for their convocation citing the CJI’s response to an urgent mentioning over alleged police brutality against student protesters as incompatible with the values that NALSAR’s convocation is expected to embody and celebrate.
The representation, submitted on July 23, was initially signed by approximately 70 students of the outgoing 2026 batch. Within two days, around 380 additional students from the 2027 to 2031 batches had extended their solidarity and support a display of collective institutional conscience that underscores the depth of feeling on a campus where constitutional values are not merely studied but lived.
The Precipitating Incident: “Don’t Waste Our Time”
The representation’s primary grievance is grounded in a specific and documented judicial exchange one that took place before the CJI’s bench on July 22, two days after the “Chalo Sansad” march at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi, during which student protesters had gathered to press their demands for accountability in India’s examination system.
According to the representation, when a lawyer made an urgent mentioning before the CJI seeking an emergency hearing on the plea over police action against protesters at the July 20 march, the Chief Justice’s response was: “Don’t waste our time, and don’t waste your time.”
When counsel offered to show video evidence of the alleged police action, the CJI was reported to have said: “We are not interested in videos; we don’t have time to watch.”
The students’ representation also referred to a separate letter petition already before the CJI seeking the Supreme Court’s Suo motu intervention in the events of July 20 a petition that cited injuries to over 170 protesters, including women and children, and raised the possibility of violations of the procedural safeguards laid down by the Supreme Court itself in the landmark ruling of DK Basu v. State of West Bengal the judgment that established the foundational constitutional standards governing arrest and detention in India.
It is this body of material the CJI’s reported dismissal of an urgent plea concerning documented injuries to over 170 citizens including children, and his stated disinclination to view video evidence of the alleged police conduct that the NALSAR students have placed at the centre of their representation.
The Constitutional Argument: Convocation as Institutional Statement
The representation is not a personal attack on the Chief Justice of India. It is, in its most careful reading, a constitutional argument about what a law school convocation represents and what message the choice of its chief guest communicates to the graduating class and to the wider world about the values the institution holds dear.
The students wrote that a convocation should be a moment where the university’s values including a commitment to constitutional rights, access to justice, and reasoned engagement with grievances are visible in the choices it makes.
They said it did not sit right with them to receive their degrees from a dignitary whose recent public conduct appeared dismissive of serious allegations of police brutality against protesting citizens.
The argument is one of institutional coherence the idea that a national law university whose entire pedagogical mission is built on constitutional values, the rule of law, and access to justice cannot, without contradiction, invite as the presiding figure at its graduation ceremony a judicial officer whose recent conduct its students regard as a departure from those very values.
NALSAR is not an ordinary university. It is one of the five original National Law Schools established by the Bar Council of India under the National Law School model an institution whose mission is the education of lawyers trained not merely in the technical craft of legal argument, but in the constitutional values and social commitments that give law its purpose.
Its students arrive having studied constitutional law, human rights law, access to justice, and the jurisprudence of police accountability.
They graduate into a profession whose highest calling is the protection of those values against every form of institutional erosion.
When those students say that a particular choice of convocation chief guest does not sit right with those values, they are not being presumptuous.
They are exercising precisely the constitutional conscience that four or five years of legal education at NALSAR is designed to cultivate.
The July 20 March: What the Students Say Happened
To understand the full weight of the NALSAR students’ representation, it is necessary to understand what the Chalo Sansad march of July 20 involved and what the students allege occurred during it.
The march was part of the nationwide student protest movement that had been building since the NEET-UG 2026 paper leak controversy compelled the cancellation and re-examination of the medical entrance test.
Student protesters had gathered at Jantar Mantar and sought to march toward Parliament a constitutionally protected exercise of the right to peaceful assembly under Article 19(1)(b) when, according to multiple accounts, petitions, and video documentation, significant police force was deployed against the assembled demonstrators.
The letter petition before the CJI cited injuries to over 170 protesters a figure that includes, the petitioners alleged, women and children who were present in the crowd.
The Supreme Court’s own landmark ruling in DK Basu v. State of West Bengal prescribes mandatory procedural safeguards for persons taken into police custody safeguards whose alleged violation in the events of July 20 formed the basis of the urgent mentioning that the CJI is reported to have declined to hear.
It is against this factual background that the CJI’s reported observation “don’t waste our time” has landed with the particular institutional force that the NALSAR students’ representation reflects.
The Broader Context: A Supreme Court Already Engaged with the Protests
The NALSAR students’ representation does not stand in isolation. It arrives in the context of a Supreme Court that has, in its August 3 hearing, demonstrated a far more engaged institutional response to the protest-related matters than the July 22 mentioning suggested.
The Supreme Court’s bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant, Justice Joymalya Bagchi, and Justice V Mohana has since directed states to close or withdraw FIRs against student protesters in accordance with law, clarified that “criminal antecedents” means only grave and heinous offences, committed to laying down a protocol on the use of pellet guns against civilian demonstrators, and directed the preservation of CCTV footage and police records from the protest period.
These are significant, substantive, and constitutionally sensitive directions ones that reflect a bench taking the police accountability question seriously enough to supervise it through continued judicial engagement over multiple hearings.
Whether the CJI’s July 22 response to the urgent mentioning which preceded the August 3 hearing reflected a snap assessment of an incompletely presented matter or a considered judicial determination is a question that the NALSAR students have asked, and that only the Chief Justice himself is positioned to answer.
The Request: Consultation, Not Confrontation
The NALSAR students are careful to frame their representation as a request for dialogue rather than a demand for a particular outcome.
The students asked the university to reconsider the choice of chief guest and to consult the graduating batch before any final decision was communicated or an invitation extended.
They said they remained open to discussing the matter further, through a meeting with student representatives or any other channel the university considered appropriate.
The formulation is measured, respectful, and institutionally mature the request of students who have been educated in the traditions of reasoned legal argument and who understand the difference between principled dissent and disrespectful confrontation. They are not demanding that the CJI be uninvited.
They are asking that the university take their perspective seriously before any decision is finalised.
NALSAR has not announced a convocation date or confirmed the CJI’s participation.
The matter, therefore, remains open and the university’s response will itself communicate something significant about the kind of institution it chooses to be in this moment.
A Moment of Institutional Reckoning for Legal Education
The NALSAR students’ representation raises questions that extend far beyond the immediate question of who addresses a graduating class in Hyderabad.
It raises questions about the relationship between legal education and judicial accountability about whether the institutions that train the next generation of India’s lawyers are prepared to hold the judiciary to the same standards of constitutional conduct that they train their students to apply to every other institution of the state.
Law schools across the democratic world have, at various moments in their histories, been required to navigate precisely this tension between institutional respect for the judiciary and the critical engagement with judicial conduct that a genuinely constitutional legal education demands. The NALSAR students’ representation is India’s version of that perennial institutional question.
Their argument, reduced to its constitutional essence, is straightforward a convocation chief guest is not merely a ceremonial presence.
He or she is a symbolic statement of the values the institution reveres, the conduct it celebrates, and the model of professional life it holds up to its graduates as they enter the legal profession.
When the students of a national law university say that a particular individual’s recent public conduct is not consistent with the values they have spent five years studying, learning, and internalising, that representation deserves institutional respect rather than administrative dismissal.
Whether NALSAR’s Vice-Chancellor and faculty agree with the students’ assessment of the CJI’s July 22 response is a separate question.
What the students are asking that their perspective be heard and considered before any final decision is made is a request that every institution committed to the principle of reasoned engagement with legitimate grievances is constitutionally obliged to honour.
