No Bench For Women!

Gender discrimination runs deep in the judiciary. There are not enough women lawyers and judges in courts today. Though that might change with more and more girls passing out of law colleges, what needs change is the attitude towards them.

- Soni Mishra

In December 2013, Avani Bansal, who had just completed her masters in law from Oxford University, landed in the district court of Harda in Madhya Pradesh. She had made up her mind to begin her career in litigation the hard way—taking up practice in criminal law in a trial court. She knew it would be tough, but that didn’t prepare her for the extremely hostile workplace.

Bansal, 28, who is about to start practice in the Supreme Court, recalls how the male lawyers in the trial court used every tactic under the belt to unnerve her—from commenting on her attire to making snide remarks about her Oxford degree to getting outright hostile by yelling at her, ‘Zyada hoshiyari na dikhao [Don’t try to act smart].’

“I was one of two or three women in a court where hundreds of lawyers practised,” she says. “I was an oddity who was stared at, humiliated, who was either an irritant for the male lawyers or a source of amusement. The lawyers were hostile, and the judges never reprimanded them.”

If Bansal, a new entrant, had to brave hostility borne out of gender bias in a trial court, a senior lawyer like Indira Jaising says she still has to tackle discrimination in the hallowed precincts of the Supreme Court. “Even after ‘I have made it’, my word is often treated as less valuable than the word of a male lawyer,” she says (see interview).

The bench appears to be no different, with women judges complaining of discrimination, too. Very few of them have made it to the top levels, and even then, their calibre is under great scrutiny. Former Supreme Court judge Gyan Sudha Misra reportedly told a fellow male judge who was constantly questioning her understanding of an issue, “Stop judging the judge, and start judging the matter.”