MP High Court Acts on Threats to Judge Tabassum Khan, Takes Suo Motu Cognisance & Seeks Police Reply
(By Syed Ali Taher Abedi)
Jabalpur, July 3, 2026-A Division Bench comprising Justice Vivek Agarwal and Justice Avanindra Kumar Singh of the Madhya Pradesh High Court, Jabalpur, passed an order on July 1, 2026, taking Suo motu cognizance of news reports concerning communal threats issued against Additional District and Sessions Judge Tabassum Khan of Narmadapuram district incorporating the matter into a pending Suo motu reference already before the court concerning the welfare and protection of judicial officers in the state.
She delivered justice. She sentenced seven cow vigilantes to life imprisonment for the brutal mob lynching of a Muslim truck driver in 2022. And then within days of her verdict she became the target of a coordinated online campaign of communal threats and religious vilification that sought to punish her not for any wrongdoing, but for the courage of doing her duty.
The Madhya Pradesh High Court has now taken Suo motu cognizance of what it has called a serious matter and has placed both the state’s Director General of Police and the Additional Chief Secretary for Home on personal notice, demanding affidavits explaining what action has been taken to protect a judge who dared to do precisely what the Constitution appointed her to do.
The Suo motu power the court’s inherent authority to act of its own motion, without waiting for a party to petition it is among the most constitutionally significant instruments available to a constitutional court.
Its exercise in this instance is a statement of institutional solidarity of the most unambiguous kind the High Court of Madhya Pradesh has looked at what was done to one of its judicial officers after she delivered a lawful verdict, declared the situation a serious matter, and moved without hesitation to place the state’s highest law enforcement authority on formal notice to explain what protective action it has taken and what steps it has initiated against those responsible for the threats.
The Verdict That Made Her a Target: Life Imprisonment for Seven Cow Vigilantes
To understand why the Madhya Pradesh High Court has reacted with institutional urgency to this episode, it is necessary to understand the judicial act that triggered the threatening campaign against Judge Tabassum Khan and the human reality that lay behind it.
In 2022, Sheikh Lala Nazir Ahmed a truck driver, a Muslim man going about his lawful occupation was set upon by a mob acting on suspicions that he was engaged in cow smuggling.
What followed was not a confrontation, not a detention, not even a lawful citizen’s arrest. It was mob violence of the most savage character a lynching. Sheikh Lala Nazir Ahmed did not survive.
Four years later, Additional District and Sessions Judge Tabassum Khan delivered her verdict in the criminal case arising from that lynching.
She found seven accused persons guilty and sentenced them to life imprisonment the maximum punishment available under the criminal law for the offence of murder a sentence that reflected both the gravity of the crime and the court’s determination that those who take the law into their own hands and destroy human life in the name of vigilantism must face the full weight of judicial consequence.
It was a verdict of which any court in any civilised jurisdiction ought to be proud.
It was a verdict that said, with the unambiguous authority of a judicial officer constitutionally appointed to administer justice, that no grievance however sincerely held, however culturally embedded justifies the taking of a human life by a mob operating outside every principle of due process, legal authority, and constitutional governance.
And it was for this verdict for this act of judicial duty that Judge Tabassum Khan found herself targeted.
The Campaign: Online Posts, Communal Vilification, and Targeted Threats
Following the delivery of the verdict, online posts began to circulate that targeted Judge Tabassum Khan specifically on the basis of her religious identity her Muslim faith and issued threats against her.
The campaign was not a debate about the legal merits of the judgment.
It was not a discussion of the evidence or the applicable law. It was a communally motivated assault, directed at a judicial officer as an individual, premised on the proposition that a judge of a particular religious identity should not be permitted to deliver verdicts that affect members of another community in a manner they find unfavourable.
The implications of this proposition if left unchallenged would be devastating for the constitutional order.
An independent judiciary requires, as its most foundational precondition, that judicial officers be free to decide the cases before them on the basis of law and evidence alone, without reference to the religious, caste, or communal identity of the judge or the parties.
The moment a judicial officer becomes vulnerable to targeted communal attack because of the religious identity she was born with, the independence of the judiciary has been assailed at its roots and with it, the constitutional promise of equal justice before a neutral arbiter.
The High Court’s Response: Suo Motu Cognizance and a Constitutional Declaration
The Madhya Pradesh High Court’s response to the reports of threats against Judge Tabassum Khan was swift, unequivocal, and constitutionally grounded.
The court declared: “We are of the opinion that such activities directly hamper the judicial independence and fearless working of our Judicial Officers.”
This single sentence is a constitutional declaration of the first importance.
The High Court is not saying merely that the threats are illegal which they are, engaging multiple provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita concerning intimidation, communal provocation, and criminal conspiracy.
It is saying something constitutionally deeper: that the conduct complained of strikes at judicial independence itself the foundational principle upon which the entire system of constitutional adjudication rests.
The bench went further, articulating with precision the boundary that the threats against Judge Khan had crossed that judicial orders are subject to appellate or revisional scrutiny under the law, and that this is the constitutionally prescribed mechanism through which those who are aggrieved by a judicial verdict may seek redress.
The court declared: “When we are of the opinion that any order passed by the Judicial Officer is subject to judicial scrutiny as per the forum provided for said scrutiny, be it in the form of appeal or revision, but our judicial officer cannot be threatened merely because he or she chooses to pass a particular order and that is not of liking of certain sections of the society.”
The constitutional logic is irrefutable. India’s procedural law provides a comprehensive and multi-tiered system of appellate recourse for those who are dissatisfied with any judicial verdict.
The Sessions Court’s judgment is appealable to the High Court. The High Court’s judgment is appealable to the Supreme Court.
At every tier, the appellate court is empowered to examine the record, the evidence, and the legal reasoning of the court below and to correct any error it finds.
This is the constitutionally prescribed remedy for judicial error, real or perceived.
What the threats against Judge Tabassum Khan sought to impose in place of this constitutional remedy is something entirely different the extrajudicial intimidation of a judicial officer into delivering verdicts that satisfy the expectations of a particular community, under the implicit threat of personal harm if she fails to do so.
That substitution of mob pressure for appellate scrutiny is not merely illegal. It is a constitutional atrocity and the Madhya Pradesh High Court has named it as such.
The Orders: Protection, Affidavits, and Formal Accountability
The High Court’s orders in the matter are both immediate and systemic in their character.
As an immediate measure, the court directed that police protection be continued for Judge Tabassum Khan through the Superintendent of Police, Narmadapuram an interim protective direction that acknowledges the reality of ongoing risk to the judicial officer while the investigation into the threats proceeds.
For systemic accountability, the bench directed the Additional Advocate General to take formal notice and file personal affidavits of both the Director General of Police and the Additional Chief Secretary/Principal Secretary (Home) India’s two senior-most administrative officers responsible for law and order in the state explaining the steps being taken against the miscreants responsible for the threats.
The direction for personal affidavits from the DGP and the Additional Chief Secretary is an order of institutional gravity.
It places the highest levels of the state’s administrative and law enforcement hierarchy on direct personal accountability before the High Court requiring them to explain, on affidavit and in their own names, what the state has done to protect a judicial officer and to pursue those who threatened her.
It is a direction that cannot be satisfied by a routine departmental response. It demands individual accountability from those who hold individual institutional responsibility.
The Superintendent of Police, Narmadapuram, was separately directed to file an affidavit explaining the specific action taken against the alleged miscreants responsible for issuing the threats.
The Deputy Advocate General Abhijeet Awasthy informed the Court that an FIR had already been registered in connection with the threatening online posts a confirmation that the state had initiated criminal action, but one that the High Court clearly regarded as insufficient in itself to close the judicial inquiry into the adequacy of the state’s protective and investigative response.
The Constitutional Dimensions: Judicial Independence, Article 235, and the Duty of the State
The incident involving Judge Tabassum Khan engages constitutional principles that operate at multiple levels simultaneously.
At the level of judicial independence, the Constitution of India vests in the judiciary from the Supreme Court to the district courts a constitutional mandate to administer justice without fear or favour.
The security of judicial officers, which is a prerequisite for the discharge of that mandate without fear, is a constitutional obligation of the state that flows from the very nature of the judicial function. Article 235 of the Constitution vests in the High Court control over the district judiciary, including responsibility for the welfare and conditions of service of district judges.
The High Court’s Suo motu action in this case is a direct exercise of that supervisory constitutional authority.
At the level of communal harmony, the Constitution of India, in its Preamble and its Fundamental Rights provisions, guarantees to every citizen including every judicial officer equality before the law and equal protection of the laws without discrimination on grounds of religion.
The targeting of Judge Tabassum Khan on the basis of her Muslim identity is an assault on those guarantees one that the state, through its police and its prosecutorial machinery, is constitutionally required to address with the same vigour it would bring to any other form of criminal intimidation of a public official.
At the level of the rule of law, the entire architecture of criminal justice depends upon the willingness of judicial officers to deliver verdicts that may displease powerful interests and upon the assurance that the state will protect those officers from the consequences of doing so.
A judiciary whose officers can be intimidated into favourable verdicts through communal threats is not a judiciary at all. It is a ratification mechanism for mob preference dressed in judicial robes.
The Madhya Pradesh High Court has refused to accept that outcome and has placed the state on notice that it will not be permitted to accept it either.
The Connection to a Wider Crisis: Judicial Security in Contemporary India
The High Court’s Suo motu action in the matter of Judge Tabassum Khan does not stand in institutional isolation.
It arrives in the same season as the representation submitted by Dr Adesh C. Agarwala of the All-India Bar Association to the Prime Minister seeking lifelong security for retired Supreme Court and High Court judges, the killing of Senior Advocate Khaja Moizuddin in Hyderabad in circumstances suggesting premeditated targeting, and the Supreme Court Bar Association’s declaration that an attack on a legal professional is an assault on the institution of justice itself.
Together, these episodes compose a picture of a justice system whose servants judges and advocates alike are being increasingly subjected to threats, violence, and targeted campaigns of intimidation by those who find their professional conduct inconvenient.
The constitutional implications of this pattern are profound justice cannot be fearless if those who administer it live in fear. And a state that does not protect its judicial officers from communal threats has abdicated one of its most fundamental constitutional obligations.
The Madhya Pradesh High Court, by taking Suo motu cognizance of what has been done to Judge Tabassum Khan, has declined to accept that abdication.
It has placed on record, with the full institutional authority of a constitutional court, that judicial independence is not a bureaucratic aspiration but a constitutional requirement and that those who threaten it will be required to answer for their conduct before the law.
In Closing: A Judge Who Did Her Duty
Additional District and Sessions Judge Tabassum Khan sentenced seven men to life imprisonment for the mob lynching of Sheikh Lala Nazir Ahmed.
She did so because the evidence before her, the law applicable to it, and her judicial conscience required her to do so. She did so regardless of her own religious identity, the religious identity of the accused, and the communal pressures that surrounded the case.
That is what a judicial officer is appointed to do. That is what the Constitution requires of every person who takes the judicial oath. And that is precisely what those who threatened her could not tolerate not the verdict itself, but the independence of mind and the fearlessness of conscience from which it sprang.
The Madhya Pradesh High Court has made clear that it will not stand by while that fearlessness is subjected to communal assault.
The state has been placed on notice. The DGP and the Additional Chief Secretary must now answer in writing. And the institution of justice for whose integrity Judge Tabassum Khan has paid a personal price has spoken in her name and in the name of every judicial officer who will one day be required to make a difficult call.
