The Bombay High Court Should Know that Prevention of Genocide Is Everyone's Business

On July 25, the Bombay high court dismissed a petition filed by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) challenging the Mumbai police’s refusal to give permission for a rally on Gaza. In their remarks, the bench reportedly asked the petitioners to instead “be patriots” and to “concentrate on problems affecting India”. As we witness the starvation in Gaza reach catastrophic levels (48 Palestinians have died of starvation in July 2025 alone), these remarks demonstrate both a fundamental misunderstanding of genocide, and how civil society should operate in a healthy democracy. 

The last month has been a watershed moment in global opinion on Gaza. Organisations who have long maintained silence on Gaza, have since spoken out or platformed articles about how Israel’s actions constitute genocide. Over 100 humanitarian groups have come together to warn of mass starvation in Gaza. The BBC, AFP, AP and Reuters released a joint statement, highlighting how their own contributing journalists are now unable to feed themselves and their families. The AFP in a separate statement called on Israel to allow the evacuation of its journalists from Gaza. For the first time in the history of the news agency, AFP said, its journalists were at risk of dying of hunger. After months of ignoring Palestinian distress, the images of starvation from Gaza are once again global front page news. 

Diplomatic interventions have also reflected this shift. Staunch allies of Israel, including Germany and the UK have called for an immediate ceasefire to address the starvation crisis. India, which as late as last month abstained on a ceasefire resolution at the UNGA, has now, through its permanent representative to the UN, called for an immediate and permanent ceasefire and the safe, sustained and timely delivery of humanitarian aid.  

And yet, the Bombay high court’s strictures are not surprising. They are reflective of a vague elite Indian sentiment on Palestine that has grown in the context of three broader themes that have defined the public discourse in India in the last decade. 

First, the securitisation of foreign policy. Foreign policy is increasingly treated by the media in India as a matter that should be held to be above the scope of political debate or judicial review. Any political dissent on the government’s foreign policy is seen as unpatriotic or contrary to national interests. 

This is reflected in the remarks of the Bombay high court where the judges reportedly pointed out that the CPI(M)’s stance on Palestine differed from the Union government’s and that the petitioners “don’t understand what this could do to the foreign affairs of the country”.

And while this willingness to curb civil liberties in India to further what the court imagines to be India’s foreign policy is shocking, the unwillingness of the court to judicially scrutinise foreign policy on genocide is not new. In September 2024, the Supreme Court dismissed a petition that sought a suspension of arms exports by India to Israel, saying that they could not interfere in foreign policy. 

Second, the decades long communalisation of the public security discourse.

Last week, the Bombay high court acquitted all 12 Muslim men convicted by the lower courts for the 2006 Mumbai train blasts. While the Maharashtra government has appealed the verdict in the Supreme Court, the high court’s scathing remarks on custodial torture and the general inadequacy and inconsistency of the evidence provided by the prosecution paint a picture vastly different from the picture painted by the Indian media about the case over the years.

This isn’t the only such high profile acquittal. In 2016 a MCOCA special court discharged eight Muslim men accused of the 2006 Malegaon blasts. In May 2014, the Supreme Court acquitted the six accused in the 2002 Akshardham temple terror attack case. In each of these cases, the initial media coverage left no doubt in the minds of the public of the guilt of the accused.

In his book, The Silent Coup, Indian journalist Josy Joseph argues that this isn’t accidental, and that much of the media has specifically been guilty of regurgitating stories fed to them by intelligence sources without independent verification, especially when the accused are Muslim. Terror attacks where the accused are members of Hindutva groups have on the other hand been treated differently. Pragya Thakur, one of the accused in the Malegaon blasts, has not only been given the benefit of the doubt that all undertrials deserve, but has gone on to be released from prison on medical grounds, and been elected to the Indian parliament. This casual discursive association of Islam with terrorism, that dominates large sections of the Indian media and the public discourse, did not begin in 2014. It has been the work of decades and is a perhaps an inescapable feature of the post- 9/11 “war on terror” discourse. On Palestine, this has meant that the mainstream Indian media has successfully shorn armed resistance from the decolonial context in which it was historically presented to the Indian public and reframed it as terrorism.  

Third, the dismantling of civil society and the glorification of callousness in the public discourse.

Civil society has been a particular target of the Modi years. This assault has involved both direct action like curbs on foreign funding, the arrest and detention of prominent activists, and the enactment of laws like the Maharashtra Public Security Bill, and also a larger culture of mockery and derision of public activism. From the moniker of “andolanjeevi” made popular by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the more threatening “urban Naxal” used to silence anyone critical of excesses committed by state forces in counter-insurgency operations, the discourse has created an Indian urban elite that strongly believes that activism, or even just the human act of offering solidarity or sympathy to those struggling is pretentious at best, and dangerous at worst. This, together with rising Islamophobia, has created a public discourse completely devoid of empathy, and a political discourse that is comfortable with promoting violence against the weakest.

The indifference to the plight of Rohingya refugees or the targeting of Bengali Muslim migrant workers around the country, are all products of this public culture devoid of empathy. This lack of empathy has found its way into judicial pronouncements. In May 2025, the Supreme Court dismissed a petition filed with respect to allegations that the Indian government had illegally left Rohingya refugees in the Andaman Sea terming it “fanciful” and a “beautifully crafted story”, despite the UN raising the alarm, and petitioners providing evidence. On Palestine, this has meant that some of the most unsympathetic takes on the devastation of civilian life in Gaza (especially with respect to children) have come from the Indian media. 

In international law, the prevention of genocide is a jus cogens norm. This means that it is absolute in nature and that it cannot be overridden by treaties or agreements. It binds all states, and does not allow for any exceptions. Many countries have successfully exercised universal criminal jurisdiction over crimes related to genocide. In other words, the prevention of genocide is everyone’s business. To argue that this responsibility diminishes with distance or is somehow less important than local civic issues like flooding or the state of the roads demonstrates a disturbing refusal on the part of the courts to engage with what genocide really means. 

There is undoubtedly no dearth of issues to protest about in India. A review of the last few months alone provides many examples –  a COVID-19 death toll that was undercounted by millions, allegations of widespread electoral malpractice, railway accidents, stampedes, bridge collapses, school building collapses, a mass disenfranchisement exercise and the state arbitrarily picking up migrant workers, accusing them of being Bangladeshi immigrants, and “pushing” them over the Bangladesh border without any due process to establish citizenship. 

A court which truly cared about the dearth of widespread activism about any of these issues would recognise the root cause – the decimation of civil society and spaces for free speech and dissent. And it would focus on building these spaces, not curbing them.  Activism, by definition, tends to move beyond self-interest. People who care about all the issues raised by the court with respect to public infrastructure, are also people who care about genocide in Gaza. Preserving civil society (and consequently a functional democracy) requires a judiciary that is willing to preserve constitutionally enshrined free speech and protest rights, not a judiciary that restricts free speech to an acceptable list of topics. 

Sarayu Pani is a lawyer by training and posts on X @sarayupani.

Missing Link is her column on the social aspects of the events that move India.

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