![]() ![]() ‘need and feel of the time’: A surprisingly laid-back phrase in the context. ‘that are structured and pedestaled’: And this second double-whammy? And was it really necessary to turn ‘pedestal’ into a hideous verb? ‘paradigms and parameters’: Was this double-whammy really necessary? If a sentence contains two semi-colons, you can be sure that it is longer than it needs to be. As an exercise in linguistic clarity, try writing this one giant sentence as five or six – or even seven –shorter ones instead. The very next sentence is even worse, surpassing the first in verbosity, obfuscation, flabbiness, meandering length, and analytical ineptitude. I was too hasty in concluding that the first sentence of this judgment was notably awful. The assertion by the Union of India and the complainants is that the reasonable restrictions are based on the paradigms and parameters of the Constitution that are structured and pedestaled on the doctrine of non-absoluteness of any fundamental right, cultural and social ethos, need and feel of the time, for every right engulfs and incorporates duty to respect other’s right and ensure mutual compatibility and conviviality of the individuals based on collective harmony and conceptual grace of eventual social order and the asseveration on the part of the petitioners is that freedom of thought and expression cannot be scuttled or abridged on the threat of criminal prosecution and made paraplegic on the mercurial stance of individual reputation and of societal harmony, for the said aspects are to be treated as things of the past, a symbol of colonial era where the ruler ruled over the subjects and vanquished concepts of resistance and, in any case, the individual grievances pertaining to reputation can be agitated in civil courts and thus, there is a remedy, and viewed from a prismatic perspective, there is no justification to keep the provision of defamation in criminal law alive as it creates a concavity and unreasonable restriction in individual freedom and further progressively mars voice of criticism and dissent which are necessitous for the growth of genuine advancement and a matured democracy. ‘reviver’: Unpardonable typo in the first sentence of a major judgment ‘the controls, restrictions and constrictions’: more verbosity By now, the reader is stuck in a quicksand of adjectives. ‘exploring manifold and multilayered, limitless, unbounded and unfettered spectrums’: Again, this is verbose, repetitive and highly florid. ‘venerated and exalted right’: Why the florid repetition? ‘percipient discord’: How can ‘discord’ possibly be ‘percipient’? Unless ‘discord’ is being used here, incorrectly, as a synonym for ‘disagreement.’ Even then, ‘percipient’ strikes the wrong note. So you’d be saying ‘this batch of petitions has, at its core, the complaint that…’ If so, ‘at its core’ would have been a much clearer phrase. “its quintessential conceptuality”: I assume the possessive ‘its’ refers to the ‘batch of writ petitions’. In any case, a person would, correctly, ‘cavil at’ something, not ‘exposit cavil.’ It is not a synonym for all forms of complaint. “exposits cavil”: are you sure you mean ‘cavil’? The word refers to a petty or inconsequential complaint. As an exercise in clarity, try rewriting this long, single sentence as two or three shorter ones, using fewer adjectives and synonyms. It is among the worst sentences I’ve encountered in all my years of reading legal materials. This sentence is so convoluted – and so riddled with adjectives – as to be impenetrable to lawyer and lay reader alike. This batch of writ petitions preferred under Article 32 of the Constitution of India exposits cavil in its quintessential conceptuality and percipient discord between venerated and exalted right of freedom of speech and expression of an individual, exploring manifold and multilayered, limitless, unbounded and unfettered spectrums, and the controls, restrictions and constrictions, under the assumed power of “reasonableness” ingrained in the statutory provisions relating to criminal law to reviver and uphold one’s reputation. ![]() In the spirit of my vocation, I decided to go through the first paragraph of Justice Dipak Misra’s judgment, taking my “red pen” to it as I would to any submission sent to me as an editor. I am a former university lecturer in law who has worked in journalism for nearly 25 years as an editor and writer. ![]() The judgment is 268 pages long, running to 198 imposing paragraphs. Instead, it is a simple attempt – by a flabbergasted reader – to parse the language of the court, which, in keeping with an alarming trend in Indian jurisprudence, is a hodge-podge of catastrophic syntax and overblown (sometimes laughable) vocabulary. The aim of this short exercise is not to delve into the merits of the court’s decision. The Supreme Court of India ruled last week in the case of Subramanian Swamy v Union of India, on the law of criminal defamation. ![]()
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