The Leaflet 2025 Must Reads: In Retrospect
As 2025 closes, the question isn't whether our institutions collapsed. The law kept working, kept speaking in the language of procedure and propriety, and yet stepped aside precisely when insistence was required.
Published on: 4 January 2026, 11:24 am
Dear reader,
In Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day (1989), the protagonist, a butler named Stevens, realises too late that a life spent in the service of restraint was also a life that looked away. The tragedy was not that he served poorly, but that he served well and in doing so, missed what mattered. The past year seemed uncomfortably close to this condition.
As 2025 closes, the question isn't whether our institutions collapsed. They didn't. Courts functioned. Files moved. Orders were passed. The machinery ran. But something else happened or rather, did not happen. The law kept working, kept speaking in the language of procedure and propriety, and yet stepped aside precisely when insistence was required.
Last year marked the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Indian Constitution. In a critical contribution in our Republic Day Special Issue last January, advocate Mohammad Wasim returned to first principles in his reflection, reminding us that the Constitution was never meant merely to endure. Its promise lay in intervention, in its capacity to stand in the way of power, even when power presents itself as routine, lawful, and well-mannered.
Much of our coverage this year traced what happens when that capacity weakens.
2025 saw three Chief Justices take office in quick succession. Alongside this churn, the Collegium continued to shape the Court's future, often in ways that raised more questions than answers. Recent appointments and transfers have highlighted how judicial futures are arranged well in advance, with little transparency about how or why.
In a leading essay in our closing special issue in 2025 for Constitution Day, Justice K. Chandru wrote candidly about his own appointment to the Madras High Court, describing how discretion, delay, and silence structure the entire Collegium process. Raju Ramachandran, Mohammed Afeef, and Shruti Narayan examined how political affiliations continue to shadow judicial appointments, particularly when reasons are rarely placed on record.
Reflecting on Justice Gavai’s tenure as the Chief Justice, Indira Jaising asked a harder question: what can symbolic representation achieve when institutional independence is absent?
Beyond the judiciary, the law's uneven presence shaped everyday life in quieter, more insidious ways - for instance, by debilitating the state of adult franchise in India. In our Independence Day Special Issue last year, Akash Bhattacharya showed how urban demolitions erase not only homes, but addresses, votes, and political presence. Jiyaul Haque and Nizamuddin Ahmad Siddiqui traced voter deletions in Bihar, where citizenship thinned not through proclamation, but paperwork. Citizenship, it turns out, can disappear quietly through administrative procedure.
Healthcare followed a similar trajectory. In a special issue curated by our co-founder Anand Grover, Vivek Divan mapped the movement away from constitutional equity towards insurance-led governance, a system where rights exist on paper even as access becomes increasingly conditional. Environmental law offered its own cautionary note. Settled principles briefly appeared firm, only to be recalled through procedural reopening.
The strain on liberty became especially visible in the criminal process. The incarceration of Umar Khalid, Gulfisha Fatima, Sharjeel Imam in the Delhi riots conspiracy cases, what Harshit Anand described as the “enduring evidence of India’s Jim Crow era” continued without trial. Periods of interim release by trial courts ended, predictably, with a return to prison.
In shrinking liberal democracies, people led movements are bound to confront backlash. In a special issue curated by Jhuma Sen and Asmita Basu in March, on backlash against the feminist movement, Sudarsana Kundu and Arundhati Sridhar documented how regulatory controls like the FCRA have financially constrained feminist organizing. Ruchira Goswami dismantled the persistent myth of "misuse" surrounding Section 498A, showing how anecdote and moral panic continue to eclipse evidence.
2025 also marked the launch of ‘Staying Alive’, our year-long series on twenty years of India’s domestic violence law, curated by Asmita Basu. The series brings together drafters, campaigners, lawyers, and survivors to build a ‘living archive,’ attentive not only to what the law says, but to how it survives and works in practice.
The year closed with work itself becoming a site of protest. On its final day, gig workers across the country logged off platforms in a nationwide strike, demanding fair wages, dignity, and social security.
On May Day last year, Gautam Mody had examined how the new Labour Codes, brought to force in November, recast long-fought protections as discretionary policy choices. Ritu Dewan showed how women's labour continues to fall outside the law's field of vision entirely. With the President's assent to the G RAM G Bill, Nesar Ahmad traced how a demand-driven right to work is being replaced by a more discretionary, scheme-based model.
Perhaps what 2025 showed us is this. That restraint and procedural propriety mean little if, in their service, we look away from what is being lost. Unlike Stevens, the butler, we do not have the luxury of hindsight. The law unfolds in real time. It asks us to pay attention now, not later, not in retrospect, but as it happens.
As we step into 2026, we remain committed to doing just that. And as Raju Z Moray reminds us in his New Year poem, perhaps the year ahead asks us to look beyond the hype of renewal and reckon honestly with what persists.
We wish you a new year not of easy reassurances, but of clear sight.
Warmly,
The Leaflet editorial team