How Can You Uphold the Law When You Are Controlled by Your Id?

The law, by its very architecture, is an exercise in artificial maturity. Humanity spent centuries building legal frameworks specifically to save ourselves from our worst instincts. Human beings are not always rational, patient or restrained. Society created rules, procedures and avenues for fair hearings because we understood a simple truth: when power is left entirely to instinct, emotion and personal judgment, justice becomes impossible.

The law was meant to be the slow, deliberate adult in the room.

But looking at the recent behaviour of some of India's most powerful legal and regulatory institutions, that adult sometimes seems to have left the building. In its place is a volatile, thin-skinned authority that behaves less like a guardian of justice and more like an unhinged toddler having a temper tantrum in public.

To understand what is going wrong here, we have to briefly step out of the courtroom and into Freudian psychology.

Sigmund Freud divided the human psyche into the Id, the Ego and the Superego. The Id represents our instinctive and immediate impulses; it wants what it wants, and it wants it now. The Ego, operating according to the reality principle, exists to mediate between those impulses and the constraints of the real world. It understands that actions have consequences. It recognises limits. It is, in the broadest sense, the part of the mind that says: stop, think, and consider what happens next. And hovering above them both is the Superego, our highest moral conscience.

In a democracy, the Constitution is our Superego. Procedural law is our Ego. And the unchecked desire to punish those who defy us is our Id.

The analogy is obviously imperfect. Institutions do not have human psyches. But they do have something remarkably similar: systems of rules, procedures and internal restraints designed to prevent immediate impulses from becoming consequential decisions.

A functional constitutional democracy is designed to be the triumph of institutional restraint. No matter how angry you are, there is supposed to be a process. No matter how powerful you are, there is supposed to be a rulebook. The entire point of institutions is to ensure that personal emotion does not automatically become institutional action.

Yet what we are witnessing in too many places is the surrender of institutional restraint to something much closer to the raw, unchecked impulses of the Id.

We witnessed this institutional failure when the Bar Council of India (BCI) turned its wrath on NALSAR University of Law on 13 August. Around 400 students exercised their basic democratic right to question an invitation extended to Chief Justice Surya Kant for their convocation. Whatever one thinks of the students' campaign, peaceful disagreement with an invitation is not, by itself, a threat to the rule of law. Yet the BCI's initial response was outrageous. It directed State Bar Councils not to enrol the entire 2026 graduating batch of NALSAR as advocates while it sought information about the students involved in the campaign.

Think about that for a moment. An entire graduating batch was placed under a professional ‘blackball’ of sorts because some students had expressed their dissent.

I hope that there is not a soul who does not find that as ridiculous as I do.

Let me be completely clear about something before I go any further. There was nothing inherently wrong with what the students did. They exercised a democratic right. They expressed an opinion about a public figure and questioned the decision to invite him to their convocation. They are not expected to surrender their right to free speech simply because the person they are criticising happens to be the Chief Justice of India. In a constitutional democracy, the more powerful the person, the more important it is that criticism of that person remains permissible.

The students' objection did not emerge from nowhere. It arose from the CJI's handling of petitions concerning the police action against students marching to Parliament on 20 July, a response they considered dismissive enough to warrant public criticism. They were entitled to express that disagreement. A judge does not become beyond criticism simply by virtue of holding judicial office. If anything, constitutional democracy demands that the holders of extraordinary public power remain subject to scrutiny.

I am therefore not going to pretend that this is a morally ambiguous situation simply for the sake of appearing balanced.

You may disagree with their politics.

You may dislike their campaign.

You may even think their criticism was misguided.

None of that matters.

The question is whether they had the right to express it.

They did.

And even if they hadn't, the BCI's response would still have required a lawful process.

But I also want to examine what happened without allowing my own conclusion to replace the facts. So let us assume, for the sake of argument, that the BCI genuinely believed the students had crossed some institutional or professional line. Let us give that interpretation every possible benefit of the doubt. What would a mature legal institution have done? It would have identified the individuals concerned, established what they had actually done, examined whether any rule had been violated, and followed the appropriate process. It would not have threatened an entire graduating class first and asked questions later.

That distinction matters. Because even if you disagree with the students, their right to dissent does not disappear. And even if you believe an institution has been insulted, its obligation to follow the law does not disappear either.

The legal question, however, is not simply whether the BCI regulates the legal profession. It plainly does. The far more important question is whether those powers extend to students who have not yet joined that profession, and whether they can legitimately be used in this manner.

What was the statutory basis for placing an entire graduating batch at risk because of the alleged conduct of a subset of students? Why should students who had nothing to do with the campaign bear the consequences? And why should collective professional punishment precede the establishment of individual responsibility?

Those are not minor procedural questions. They go to the heart of what the rule of law is supposed to mean.

This is where the ‘institutional Id’ becomes such a useful metaphor. The response appeared immediate, punitive and profoundly disproportionate to the alleged offence. The consequences for an entire graduating batch were enormous, yet the process by which individual responsibility was to be established had apparently not even been completed.

It is difficult to look at that sequence and not ask whether the institution's desire to respond had overtaken its responsibility to exercise restraint.

The subsequent events made the episode even more extraordinary. Following severe backlash from the legal fraternity, the BCI hastily withdrew the directive within hours. But the ultimate rebuke came the next day from the Supreme Court itself. Chief Justice Surya Kant described the BCI's action as "absolutely uncalled for", adding that "even if they are wrong, they have a right to protest." Following the Court's castigation, the BCI chairman, Manan Kumar Mishra, formally apologised to the students.

And on 3 September, the Supreme Court settled the legal question altogether. A bench led by the Chief Justice ruled that the BCI has neither the jurisdiction nor the statutory competence to look into the conduct of law students before they are enrolled as advocates. That power, the Court said, rests with the students' own institutions. It declared the BCI's communications of 13 August, and its subsequent modified communication, to be without any authority of law.

In other words, the statutory basis I asked about earlier did not exist.

The irony is difficult to miss. The very judicial dignitary whose invitation had triggered the controversy did not appear to regard the students' dissent as justification for collectively threatening their professional futures.

Do not mistake the sudden reversal by the BCI as a return to sanity or grace. The reversal was welcome, but it does not erase the fact that the initial decision was made at all. Which raises an uncomfortable question: why was such an extraordinary order issued in the first place?

Institutions should not need enormous public pressure, intervention from the Supreme Court and widespread criticism before remembering the importance of restraint. The real question is not whether the BCI eventually corrected its decision. It is why the safeguards that should have prevented such a decision from being made in the first place failed.

If this were merely an isolated bureaucratic blunder, we could dismiss it as an embarrassing episode and move on. But the deeper concern is that NALSAR reflects a broader problem in Indian governance: the growing temptation to substitute immediate displays of authority for slow, transparent and legally defensible processes.

And once you begin looking for that pattern, it becomes difficult to ignore.

Consider the controversies surrounding “bulldozer justice”, where homes or properties have been demolished in the aftermath of criminal allegations before the underlying criminal process has run its course. The Supreme Court has had to intervene precisely because executive action cannot become a substitute for judicial determination.

Consider, too, the political controversy surrounding investigative agencies and the highly publicised raids they conduct. The existence of a raid is not evidence of guilt, just as the existence of an allegation is not evidence that a person deserves punishment. Investigations must be allowed to proceed, evidence must be tested, and guilt must ultimately be established through due process.

These are different situations from NALSAR. The institutions, legal powers and facts are not identical. But the temptation can be similar: act first, establish the facts later.

Building an airtight, legally sound case takes time, patience and adherence to objective rules. It requires the quiet work of the Ego. A dramatic demolition, a highly publicised raid or a blanket enrolment order is much more immediate. It creates the appearance of action. It demonstrates power. It satisfies the political demand for an instant response.

But justice is not measured by how quickly an institution can demonstrate its power.

It is measured by how carefully it exercises it.

“Why bother with the process?”

That is precisely the question a mature institution must never allow itself to answer by saying “Because we can simply act.”

When the institutions tasked with upholding the law begin to operate on emotional volatility, the entire democratic social contract collapses. We obey the law not because we fear the physical might of the state, but because we trust the predictability of its systems. The moment a regulator demonstrates that its decisions are guided by emotions and personal views rather than the rulebook, that foundational trust is broken.

We are creating a dangerous institutional culture in which people occupying high offices increasingly appear to treat disagreement not as a routine feature of democracy, but as an affront to institutional authority itself.

A mature, robust institution operates with restraint. It encounters disagreement and relies on consistent, transparent processes. A weak, insecure institution does the opposite. It encounters disagreement, perceives a threat and reaches instinctively for the enormous powers at its disposal.

“You challenged my authority, so I will demonstrate how much authority I have.”

That is the institutional Id.

India does not suffer from a shortage of world-class educational institutions or brilliant young minds eager to enter the workforce. What we are facing is a catastrophic deficit of emotional maturity within our regulatory bodies. We are trying to build a modern, 21st-century global power while allowing institutions with enormous authority to exercise their power with far too little restraint.

If the premier body responsible for overseeing the legal profession cannot manage its own internal psychology, it has no right to dictate ethics to the rest of the country. We cannot build a nation that respects the rule of law when the very institutions meant to protect it have proven they can be brought to their knees by their own unbridled Id.

And perhaps the irony can be expressed in a single sentence.

Amid a judicial system struggling with more than five crore pending cases and thousands of vacant judicial posts, one of the country's most important legal regulators found itself expending enormous institutional energy on a controversy arising from a student campaign over a convocation invitation.

That should bother us.

Not because students should be immune from scrutiny.

Not because institutions should never defend themselves.

But because the law is supposed to be the mechanism that prevents power from becoming personal.

The moment an institution begins treating disagreement as an insult, and punishment as the first response, the Id has already won.

OPEN YOUR EYES.