Hyderabad, Sept. 12 -- The marching has stopped, the drum rolls have died down, and the euphoria of India's 80th Independence Day celebrations has settled into memory. What remains is a question worth sitting with: how free are we, the citizens of India, really?

Former Supreme Court judge Justice Deepak Gupta has answered that question with an article that has since travelled far beyond legal circles. His central claim is uncomfortable but simple: no country can call itself free unless it has an independent and fearless judiciary. And by his own reading of the record, that independence is eroding, not because the institution has collapsed, but because the "black sheep" within it are multiplying, and the rest of the flock has chosen silen...