Judiciary and press are the two pillars of democracy: Justice Madan B. Lokur

Justice Madan B. Lokur addresses the Nai Duniya Media for Unity awards-2025, organised by Nai Duniya Foundation at IIC in New Delhi on April 19, 2025. Photo: Aman Raj/The Hindu

“Both the freedom of the press and the independence of the judiciary are under assault,” Justice (Retd.) Madan B. Lokur said on Saturday (April 19, 2025), drawing parallels to the 1970s in India.

Delivering the keynote address at the Nai Duniya Foundation’s Media for Unity Awards 2025, Justice Lokur said that the judiciary and the press were “the two pillars of our democracy”.

“Judiciary felt a different kind of assault, and it came out of it by the Kesavananda Bharati judgment [on the basic structure doctrine of the Indian Constitution]. But soon after that, we encountered Emergency in 1975, and the press was subjected to severe assault. The judiciary also faced a severe test. After the Emergency, both the judiciary and the press bounced back, and some of the landmark judgments came after that,” Justice Lokur said.

“Today, again, there is an assault on the independence of the press and the independence of the judiciary. The manner of assault on the independence of the press and the judiciary is different, but the assault continues,” the former Supreme Court judge said.

Noting that there were a large number of persons in prison, including journalists, Justice Lokur said that there was a need to ask why they had not been given bail. “Is it because judiciary is afraid to give bail to these people even though there is no evidence against them? These are some questions we need to ask,” he said.

Justice Lokur gave away the Nayi Duniya Foundation awards to a host of distinguished journalists, including Suhasini Haidar, Diplomatic Editor, The Hindu. Ms. Haidar received the Kuldip Nayar Media Unity Award from Justice Lokur and the late Kuldip Nayar’s granddaughter, Mandira Nayar, for her “contributions to English journalism”.

“I would like to thank the platform that I have, which is The Hindu newspaper. It is a living example of a newspaper for which pluralism is an article of faith,” Ms. Haidar said upon receiving the award.

Other awardees included veteran journalists Arun Shourie and Mrinal Pande; founding editor of The Wire Siddharth Varadarajan; filmmaker Anubhav Sinha; broadcast journalist Preeti Choudhry; senior journalists Om Thanvi and Navin Suri; theatre luminary M.K. Raina; and the India Love Project, a social media initiative against “rising intolerance”.

Nayi Duniya Foundation president Shahid Siddiqui, and former Chief Election Commissioner and the awards’ jury head S.Y. Quraishi presided over the occasion.