Symbols hold meaning. The national emblem that India adopted after Independence, the lion capital, for example, symbolizes ideals of power and the triumph of truth. Any institutional change in iconography should make us pause for reflection.
Especially if it concerns a vital institution in a world where institutions may explain the difference between the wealth and poverty of nations, as the Economics Nobel Prize for 2024 reminds us. Last week, in a remarkable move to shed colonial baggage, the Supreme Court unveiled a redesigned version of ‘Lady Justice.’
The old statue, whose origin can be traced to ancient civilizations around the Mediterranean Sea, had balancing scales in one hand of a blindfolded woman, with a sword in the other. The scales, which represent impartiality in the weighing of cases, have been retained.
The sword of enforcement has been replaced with a copy of India’s Constitution, on which the rule of law is based, marking an Age-of-Reason shift to what must be enforced from how. The blindfold is gone, with Lady Justice’s eyes wide open—to affirm our equality.
“The law is not blind; it sees everyone equally,” said Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud at the unveiling ceremony. The rationale—to keep up with evolving ideals in India’s own context of interpretations—is in consonance with our commitment to institutional sovereignty.
What we should reflect upon, above all, is the discarded blindfold. By intent, it was a symbol of fairness. But it also exposed the law’s majesty to portrayal as sightless in popular culture, as seen in the 1983 Hindi blockbuster Andhaa Kaanoon (literally, ‘blind law’).
Open eyes, in contrast, have long inspired the poetry of love and equity, as heard in cinema and beyond. Now that a Raj legacy of dissonance has been cast off in favour of coherence, the remade Lady Justice can convey equality in the eyes of justice. As semiotic resets go, this is a judicious remake.
While we welcome it, however, we must also weigh what has been cast off. At its most worthy, the blindfold was a cue for the “veil of ignorance” in John Rawls’ theory of justice that proposes justice as fairness.
If people in an “original position” set out to institute a just system without being able to see their own social status (or endowments), he argued, then rational folks would adopt two principles: One, of liberty, equally available to all, so long as it’s compatible with the same right of others; and two, of social and economic gaps needing to work in everyone’s favour and be derived only from positions open to all in society.
Amartya Sen, in The Idea of Justice, critiques Rawls’ institutional emphasis and advocates a path laid by deliberations of democracy on the relative lives led by people, an echo of his Nobel Prize-winning work on social-choice theory calling for comparisons to unlock fairer outcomes.
Worthy as Rawls’ and Sen’s proposals are, they are too abstract to pitch in the public square for people to wrap their heads around. Perhaps an imaginary wheel of fortune could act as an aid. Suppose we are all to be randomly reborn overnight as somebody else in society, what ideals of justice would we want?
With a one-in-1.4 billion chance of being the least—or most—fortunate, Rawlsian fairness would be top priority. Just thinking of how vastly our fortunes might vary would make us reckon with inequality, as Sen urges. But then, symbolic implements are all that the Judiciary has at its disposal. And it has re-crafted them well.