Shipping out those ‘Lords’

The honourable judges begin to heed the lawyers’ demand for dignified treatment—as officers of the court, and not as colonial subjects

By Manisha

The court rooms will now reverberate with the sounds of "Your Honour", "Honourable Court", or simply "Sir". The lawyers are moving towards doing away with the colonial practice of addressing judges as “My Lord” and “Your Lordship”. And the gavel won’t be falling in humiliation.
According to a draft resolution of the Bar Council of India, the Supreme Court and High Court judges should be addressed as "Your Honour" and "Honourable Court"—those in the trial courts be referred as "Sir" or any other equivalent word in the vernaculars.

The move flows from a petition filed in the Supreme Court by a lawyers' body, The Progressive and Vigilant Lawyers' Forum. Although the apex court refused to entertain their plea, it had left it to the Bar Council of India and its state bodies to decide the manner in which they should address judges.

The Forum felt the titles undermined the dignity of the officers of the court. It argued that both “My Lord” and “Your Lordship” are expressions that hark to the colonial era. They claimed it was against the law, too, as using these “British titles of nobility” to dignify Indian judges directly contravenes Articles 18 and 14 of the Indian Constitution.

Also at stake is a lawyer’s dignity, which Article 19 (1) (a) protects. As officers of the court, their dignity, they plead, is seriously infringed by this unconstitutional practice that reeks of the Raj era, and is totally out of place in free, non-monarchic India. Continuing with the obsolete practice amounts to accepting that "we are still a subject people, and anything but citizens of a republic".
The petitioners quote from a Supreme Court Bar Association resolution of 1972 that replaced "My Lord" with "Mr Judge", and from the Constitutional Bench of the Republic of South Africa which, in 1995, came to the same conclusion.

Other precedents are the Constitutional Bench judgments in the Balaji Raghvan vs Union of India and S P Anand vs Union of India cases of 1996 (1 SCC 361.) The judgment says: "From the discussion in the preceding paragraphs, it is clear that in enacting Article18 (1), the framers of the Constitution sought to put an end to the practice followed by the British in respect of conferment of titles. They, therefore, prohibited titles of nobility and all other titles that carry suffixes or prefixes as they result in the creation of a distinct unequal class of citizens. However, the framers did not intend that the state should not officially recognize merit or work of an extraordinary nature. They, however, mandated that the honours conferred by the state should not be used as suffixes of prefixes, ie, as titles, by the recipients.”

“Lord” in Great Britain is a general title for a prince or sovereign or for a feudal superior, especially a feudal tenant who holds directly from the king (baron), said the petition.

“It today denotes a peer of the realm, a member of the House of Lords, which includes the Lords Temporal and the Lords Spiritual.” Just as pertinent, it adds, is the fact that the Great Council in 14 th century England was divided into the House of Lords and the House of Commons. The House of Lords comprised three strata of aristocrats—dukes, earls and viscounts—all of whom were addressed as “M'Lord”. The knights, who formed the lowest rung of the aristocracy, were addressed as "Sir". Considering that membership to the House of Lords was hereditary, how can such titles be conferred on Indian judges?

The apex court asked the Forum to resolve the matter with the Bar Council of India and state Bar Councils. But some lawyers felt there was no urgency and the state councils have been asked to decide in six weeks.