India, March 6 -- Somewhere in a classroom in Lucknow, Bhopal or Coimbatore, a Class 8 student has just finished reading a chapter on the Indian judiciary. They now know about case backlogs, about corruption, about disputes that drag on for decades. What they may not fully know, because the emphasis did not rest there, is what courts in India have built, protected and preserved over seventy-five years of constitutional democracy. That gap between what was highlighted and what was underplayed has now become the subject of serious judicial scrutiny.

The Supreme Court of India did not wait for a formal petition In. ReSocial Science Textbook for Grade-8 (Part 2) published by NCERT and ancillary issues, it acted on its own motion, banning the...