Manan Kumar Mishra freezes enrolment of NALSAR’s 2026 batch over campaign against CJI

On 13 August 2026, Manan Kumar Mishra, Chairman of the Bar Council of India, did something that should alarm every law student, every lawyer who still believes the profession is more than a guild of the obedient, and every citizen who understands that a free legal profession is indispensable to a constitutional democracy. He ordered a blanket freeze on the enrolment of an entire graduating batch of one of India’s premier national law universities — NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad — because a section of its students had the temerity to object to the Chief Justice of India being invited as chief guest at their convocation.

The action was swift, collective, and punitive. The justification was thin, moralistic, and authoritarian. And the partial retreat that followed within hours only made the original impulse clearer: this was not regulation. This was intimidation dressed up as institutional concern for the “highest judicial office.”

The Sequence That Reveals the Intent

The facts are now public and largely undisputed. A section of NALSAR’s 2026 graduating batch — reports place the number at roughly 450 out of approximately 1,400 students — circulated a campaign opposing the proposed participation of Chief Justice Surya Kant in the university’s convocation. Their stated reason was the CJI’s oral remarks during a hearing related to alleged police excesses against student protesters in Delhi. The remarks included the now-infamous line: “Please don’t waste our time. We don’t have time to watch these videos.”

Whether one agrees with the students’ characterisation of those remarks is irrelevant. The students exercised a form of institutional speech directed at their own university’s ceremonial choices. They did not storm a court, disrupt a hearing, or attack a judge. They objected to a guest of honour.

BCI’s response was not to ask NALSAR for clarification, not to wait for any formal complaint of misconduct under the Advocates Act, and not to distinguish between organisers and ordinary signatories. Instead, Chairman Mishra issued a communication directing every State Bar Council in the country to refuse enrolment to every NALSAR 2026 graduate until further orders. The entire batch was placed under a cloud. An authenticated factual report was demanded within three days, seeking names of those who “initiated, organised, coordinated or mobilised” the campaign, lists of signatories, details of social-media administrators, media contacts, and any involvement of faculty, alumni or outsiders. Allegations of “groupism and dirty politics” among teachers were thrown in for good measure.

Then came the language that exposed the real temperament of the order:

“A student of Law, having no regard or respect for the highest Judicial Office of the country, is not expected to be a responsible or sensible Advocate, Teacher or a Judge.”

Such students, the communication suggested, would be a “liability on the profession.” The freeze was framed as an interim measure necessary to prevent a fait accompli. A final decision was promised for 19 August.

Hours later, after the inevitable backlash, BCI modified the order. The vast majority of students, it now declared, were “innocent” and “not inclined to take part in the move of disrespect.” Enrolment was restored for the batch. The inquiry would continue, with blame shifted toward “a handful of teachers and outsiders.”

The reversal does not cleanse the original act. It confirms it. A regulator that can freeze an entire graduating class of a national law university in the morning and partially walk it back by evening is not exercising careful statutory power. It is testing how far it can go in punishing dissent before the political and professional cost becomes too high.

Collective Punishment as Regulatory Method

What Mishra ordered was collective punishment. No individual student had been found guilty of any professional misconduct under Section 24A of the Advocates Act or any other provision. No hearing had been held. No natural justice had been observed. The mere existence of a campaign critical of a proposed invitation to the Chief Justice was treated as sufficient to place every graduate of the batch under suspicion of unfitness for the profession.

This is not how a mature regulatory body behaves. It is how an insecure institution behaves when it has decided that the highest value is deference rather than independence. The Advocates Act gives the Bar Council of India significant powers over legal education and enrolment. Those powers exist to maintain standards of competence and ethics, not to enforce a culture of compulsory reverence toward sitting judges.

The distinction BCI itself tried to draw — between legitimate criticism of judicial decisions and “organised intimidation, coercion, personal vilification, disruption or boycott” — collapses under scrutiny. There is no public evidence that the NALSAR students engaged in intimidation or disruption of any judicial proceeding. They objected to a ceremonial invitation at their own university. To treat that as evidence of professional unfitness is to redefine the very idea of what a lawyer is allowed to think and say before she even enters the profession.

A Pattern, Not an Aberration

This episode cannot be viewed in isolation. Only weeks earlier, in late July 2026, the same Chairman had issued a lengthy public appeal titled “An Appeal to the Intellectuals of the Country.” In that document, student protests were described as having been “hijacked by anti-national and anti-social elements” seeking to destabilise India. Foreign adversaries, paid stone-pelters, social-media campaigns orchestrated by neighbouring countries, and shadowy political funding were invoked. Lawyers, teachers and other professionals were summoned to guide students away from such “destructive” paths and toward “peaceful, constitutional” expression — as defined, of course, by the BCI Chairman.

When lawyers criticised that framing, they were met with the familiar charge of being insufficiently patriotic or insufficiently respectful of institutions. The NALSAR order is the logical next step: if student protest can be painted as anti-national contamination, then student dissent against a judicial invitation can be painted as professional unfitness. The regulatory machinery of the Bar becomes an instrument for enforcing a particular political and institutional orthodoxy.

This is not the historic role of the Bar Council of India. The Bar has, at its best, stood between the citizen and arbitrary power — including judicial power. It has defended the right of lawyers to criticise judgments, to represent unpopular causes, and to question the functioning of courts. When the apex regulatory body of the profession begins to treat criticism of a Chief Justice’s remarks as presumptive evidence of character defect, something fundamental has shifted.

The Chilling Effect Is the Point

Law students at national law universities are not children. They are adults who have spent five years studying constitutional law, administrative law, and the history of judicial review. Many of them will go on to litigate against the State, challenge executive excess, and appear before the very courts whose dignity BCI claims to protect. If the message they receive in their final weeks is that organised institutional speech critical of a sitting Chief Justice can result in the temporary destruction of their professional prospects, the lesson is clear: keep your head down. Do not organise. Do not sign. Do not question ceremonial choices that touch the judiciary.

That lesson is incompatible with the idea of an independent Bar. An independent Bar requires lawyers who are capable of disagreeing with judges without fear that the disagreement itself will be treated as a character flaw. It requires regulators who understand the difference between professional misconduct and political or institutional dissent. It requires a Bar Council that does not confuse the dignity of the judicial office with the personal invulnerability of the office-holder.

Who Benefits from This Style of Regulation?

The question that must now be asked, and asked without euphemism, is simple: since when did the Bar Council of India become a tool for intimidation?

The answer is not found in any single circular. It is found in a pattern of rhetoric and action that treats dissent as contamination, collective punishment as interim prudence, and rapid reversal as damage control rather than institutional humility. It is found in the willingness to deploy the full coercive capacity of the enrolment process against students who have not yet even entered the profession, on the basis of a campaign that never left the realm of institutional speech.

Manan Kumar Mishra’s order of 13 August 2026 will be remembered less for the partial retreat that followed than for the impulse that produced it. That impulse reveals a regulator more anxious about controlling the political and institutional temperament of future lawyers than about protecting the conditions under which an independent legal profession can exist.

A Bar that cannot tolerate law students objecting to a guest of honour has already begun the process of forgetting what a Bar is for.