Supreme Court Justice Aravind Kumar said the belief that Delhi is India’s legal pinnacle is a false, manufactured impression, stressing that Delhi is not India and warning against equating the capital’s prominence with nationwide legal excellence and ability.
Supreme Court Justice Aravind Kumar recently asserted that “Delhi is not India and India is not Delhi,” criticizing the long-held tendency to elevate Delhi simply because it is the capital and hosts the Supreme Court and many high-profile cases.
Speaking at a seminar on Artificial Intelligence: Prevention and Resolution of Disputes in Bengaluru, Justice Kumar said the widespread belief that Delhi represents the pinnacle of legal practice is misguided and institutionally reinforced.
He said,
“An impression has been cultivated that Delhi is the natural pinnacle of legal ability in India. That impression is utterly false. It is institutionally produced, commercially amplified and socially repeated, but false nonetheless.”
He argued that Delhi’s centrality in the judicial map does not equate to superior legal ability, and that the existence of a hierarchy of forums should not be confused with a hierarchy of minds. The fact that many disputes end up in Delhi does not mean legal excellence originates there, he said.
Justice Kumar warned against treating one metropolitan circuit as inherently superior or expecting the rest of the country to simply follow its lead.
He declared,
“This attitude must go,”
Rejecting any notion that proximity to the capital confers greater professional worth, he emphasized there is no constitutional basis for elevating one legal centre above others.
He said,
“There is no constitutional caste system among Bars. There is no doctrine by which a lawyer acquires greater intrinsic worth by proximity to the capital,”
He insisted that metropolitan legal culture should not be seen as the entirety of Indian dispute resolution. What is often portrayed as superiority, he observed, is actually the outcome of litigation structures, institutional concentration, visibility and pricing power not an exclusive claim to merit.
Justice Kumar maintained that law in India is not produced in Delhi and then disseminated outward. Instead, legal argumentation, refinement and innovation take place throughout the country in High Courts, district courts, tribunals, commercial courts, arbitral institutions and capable Bars that may have less visibility but are no less important.
He added,
“The Indian legal system draws its intelligence from the whole Republic, not from one city alone,”
Turning to artificial intelligence, he cautioned that models trained primarily on Delhi-centric data risk entrenching existing hierarchies rather than broadening access.
Such systems could hard-code metropolitan bias into the future, he warned, undermining the constitutional reality of a diverse, federal, multilingual and institutionally distributed republic.