The Supreme Court has long led the nation in judicial innovation. On Wednesday (July 29), it unveiled its latest: the selectively silent live-stream. The audio of the virtual link of courtroom one (chief justice of India (CJI)’s court) was muted while lawyers mentioned urgent cases before the CJI. It was the first since hybrid hearings began. The picture continued. The country could watch the CJI’s court at work. It just could not hear it.The innovation did not arrive unheralded. Days earlier, CJI Surya Kant observed that mentioning is an “administrative and housekeeping” exercise, not a judicial proceeding. It should not, therefore, be reported. The mute button merely gave technological form to that thought. What the public should not read, it now cannot hear.Housekeeping deserves description. Every morning, after the bench assembles at 10:30 am, lawyers line up for ten to 15 minutes. They plead urgency. The CJI weighs each plea, grants a date or declines one, and often makes brief oral observations. That is all. Nothing turns on it, except whether a demolition is stayed before the bulldozer arrives. Or whether a bail plea is heard while the accused still needs one. Or whether allegations of police violence reach a courtroom at all. Dusting, essentially.Also read: ‘Can’t be a 24×7 Entertainment Channel’: Supreme Court Bans Posting, Re-posting, Uploading of Judicial ProceedingsThe recent record is instructive. On July 20, Delhi Police lathi-charged students protesting examination paper leaks at Jantar Mantar. Senior advocate Gopal Sankaranarayanan mentioned the matter before the CJI, seeking an urgent hearing. By July 27, a bench led by the CJI was declaring that peaceful protest enjoys constitutional protection. “Mere agitation cannot justify a lathi-charge,” the CJI observed. Note the sequence. The matter entered the court through mentioning. The week’s most consequential rights hearing was born in ten minutes of housekeeping. The broom, it turns out, sweeps in fundamental rights.Here the difficulty announces itself. If mentioning is genuinely administrative, muting it protects nothing worth protecting. If something turns on it, it is judicial. Then the public is entitled to hear it. The order needs both propositions to be true at once. Logic, like the audio, has been placed on mute.The muting is the second movement of a composition that began on July 24. In Harshita Grover vs Union of India, a bench of CJI Surya Kant and Justices Joymalya Bagchi and V. Mohana passed an interim order. It barred posting, reposting, extraction, modification, dissemination, monetisation and recording of live-streamed proceedings without prior permission. The permission of the Supreme Court’s secretary general, or of the registrars general of high courts, is now required. The bench clarified that news reporting is unaffected.Also read: ‘Since When is an Elected Representative Above Questioning,’ Asks CJP as Delhi Police Asks X to Take Down Posts Targeting Govt HeadsThe petition, filed by journalist Harshita Grover, complained of clipped, decontextualised courtroom exchanges circulated for engagement and revenue. Solicitor general Tushar Mehta told the bench that some courts have become “social media celebrities”. The court also asked high courts to explain “the impact of continuous livestreaming”. The homework question already contains its preferred answer. Within a week, the court moved from regulating its broadcast’s afterlife to switching off its source. First the clips, now the sound.All this is done in the name of an institution that once wrote love letters to sunlight. In Swapnil Tripathi vs Supreme Court of India, decided on September 26, 2018, a three-judge bench headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra held that live-streaming flows from the right of access to justice under Article 21. The judgment invoked the familiar aphorism that sunlight is the best disinfectant. Openness, the court promised, would pierce the mystique of the courtroom. The public agreed enthusiastically. On September 27, 2022, the first day of regular constitution bench live-streaming, more than eight lakh viewers tuned in. The EWS reservation hearing alone crossed 2.75 lakh views by that evening. The court’s YouTube channel had gathered around two lakh subscribers by late 2024. That is the audience now asked to admire the disinfectant from behind soundproof glass.Consider what the mute actually achieves. Lawyers, litigants and reporters physically present in courtroom one hear every word. The advocate in Madurai, the litigant in Guwahati and the law student in Patna do not. The mute creates no confidentiality. It restores a geography. Access to the court’s most consequential discretionary moment again belongs to those within commuting distance of Tilak Marg. Swapnil Tripathi was celebrated precisely for dismantling that privilege. The dismantling has now been dismantled, though only acoustically.Also read: ‘Right to Peaceful, Lawful Protest Absolutely Guaranteed under Constitution’: CJI Surya KantThere is a further refinement. No order, circular or notification recording the muting decision appears to have been published. A measure of transparency, born of a reasoned, reportable judgment, has been suspended without a reasoned, reportable anything. The court that requires the government to disclose the grounds for its actions has innovated past the requirement.None of this is to deny the irritant. Clipped courtroom exchanges do circulate shorn of context, with captions engineered for outrage. The CJI has personal cause for grievance; in May, he said he was “pained” by how the media had misquoted an oral observation of his, and issued a clarification. The Harshita Grover petition documents a real pathology of the attention economy. But the remedy for a decontextualised clip is context. The full stream is the best rebuttal to the dishonest excerpt. Muting removes the rebuttal, and leaves the courtroom’s version of events to those inside it. It answers selective quotation with total silence. That is not proportion. It is surrender, dressed as housekeeping.The Supreme Court’s own YouTube channel now carries a stern disclaimer. Recording, dissemination and reproduction of proceedings, it warns, are “strictly prohibited”. The sunlight remains available, in carefully rationed, permission-stamped doses. Bentham would have recognised the arrangement. He just would not have called it open justice.V. Venkatesan is a veteran legal journalist.