Judiciary and Institutions Under Modi: Before 2014 vs After 2014

Having covered nineteen distinct legal and institutional developments across this category, from the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita to the Right to Privacy judgment to chronic tribunal vacancies, this final article pulls those threads together into a structured before-and-after comparison, closing out the Judiciary, Law and Institutions category.

The Sheer Scale of Legislative and Judicial Change

Few areas of Indian governance have seen as much substantive legal change since 2014 as this category has documented: an entirely new criminal law code replacing 163 years of Indian Penal Code precedent, a landmark privacy judgment that reshaped everything from Aadhaar to data protection law, a comprehensive data protection statute finally implemented over a decade after digital privacy concerns first became a mainstream policy issue, and repeated attempts, some successful and some judicially reversed, to reform how judges and tribunal members themselves get appointed.

The National Case Pendency Trend

Despite this considerable legislative activity, one of the most consistently documented and largely unresolved problems across India’s court system as a whole has continued growing rather than shrinking: national case pendency across all levels of the Indian judiciary has climbed to roughly 5.39 crore pending cases, according to recent tracking, a figure that reflects not any single institutional failure but rather a cumulative, systemic gap between the volume of cases entering India’s court system each year and the system’s overall capacity to resolve them, a gap this category’s own coverage of specific pockets of that broader problem, POCSO case pendency crossing 94 percent and IBC resolution timelines reaching a three-year high among them, has repeatedly illustrated at a more granular level.

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Judicial Independence: A Genuinely Contested Assessment

Independent international assessment of judicial independence in India during this period has produced a notably critical picture in some respects. The International Commission of Jurists’ January 2025 report, titled “Judicial Independence in India: Tipping the Scale,” specifically raised concerns about executive influence over judicial appointments and tribunal staffing, concerns this category’s own coverage of the Collegium tensions, the NJAC’s 2015 reversal, and the repeated tribunal-independence litigation through 2025 has documented in considerable specific detail, while the World Justice Project’s Rule of Law Index has continued tracking India’s comparative standing on judicial independence and related measures against other countries over this same period, providing an external, internationally comparable benchmark alongside the more India-specific analysis.

What Has Genuinely Strengthened

Weighing the considerable evidence gathered across this entire category, several genuine institutional strengthenings stand out clearly: the Right to Privacy judgment’s establishment of a fundamental privacy right that subsequently reshaped multiple other areas of law, the eventual, if long-delayed, operationalisation of both the Lokpal and the DPDP Act’s data protection framework, and the Supreme Court’s own repeated willingness, across the NJAC ruling, the sedition abeyance order, and the 2025 tribunal-independence ruling, to check executive attempts to expand control over appointment processes it viewed as constitutionally protected judicial or quasi-judicial domains.

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What Has Remained Genuinely Contested or Worsened

Equally, several areas covered across this category show either persistent unresolved tension or measurable worsening: the sustained, well-documented pattern of CBI and Enforcement Directorate cases concentrated against opposition politicians, chronic tribunal vacancies that have continued despite repeated legislative and judicial attempts to address them, the 2023 Election Commissioner appointment law’s replacement of judicial input with executive-nominated representation, and case pendency figures that have continued climbing across the court system as a whole despite the considerable legislative and institutional activity documented throughout this category.

Why a Simple Verdict Isn’t Available Here Either

Consistent with the broader pattern this series has found across other institutional categories, a fair synthesis of India’s judiciary and legal institutions since 2014 resists any simple, single-direction verdict: genuine, substantive legal modernisation, from criminal law recodification to data protection to the Right to Privacy judgment’s far-reaching influence, has proceeded alongside persistent, well-documented capacity constraints and genuinely contested questions about institutional independence, meaning the honest overall picture is one of considerable activity and genuine change occurring within a court and institutional system that remains, by multiple independent measures, still meaningfully strained relative to the demands actually placed on it.

Bottom Line

India’s judiciary and legal institutions since 2014 present a genuinely mixed record: substantial legislative modernisation, including an entirely new criminal code, a landmark privacy judgment with far-reaching downstream influence, and the eventual operationalisation of long-delayed bodies like the Lokpal and the DPDP Act’s Data Protection Board, has proceeded alongside persistent and in some respects worsening structural strain, including national case pendency exceeding 5.39 crore, chronic tribunal vacancies that repeated reform attempts have not fully resolved, and genuinely contested questions about executive influence over judicial and Election Commissioner appointments that international assessments including the International Commission of Jurists have specifically flagged, leaving the overall period best understood as one of considerable institutional activity rather than a straightforward story of improvement or decline.

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Abhyudaya Verma