A truck left Madhya Pradesh on the night of 2 August 2022. It carried cattle and three men from Amravati in Maharashtra. Near Barakhad village, in the Seoni Malwa police area, a crowd stopped it. The crowd beat the three men with sticks and staves. Nazir Ahmed, a man of about fifty, did not survive. The other two lived to tell the court what happened.
Four years later, a judge weighed the evidence. On 12 June 2026, the First Additional Sessions Judge at Seoni Malwa convicted seven men. She held that they had formed an unlawful assembly, armed themselves with deadly weapons, and killed Nazir Ahmed with extreme brutality. She used a plain phrase to describe what they had done. She called it mob lynching. Then she sentenced them to life imprisonment.
Her name is Tabassum Khan. That name now matters more than it should. Within days, the verdict acquired a colour it never had in the courtroom. The convicts were Hindu men. The judge is a Muslim woman. For a certain kind of campaigner, that was the whole story. They did not argue with her reasoning. They did not read her findings on the medical evidence or the hostile witnesses or the law of common object. They looked at her name. They saw a Muslim woman who had jailed Hindu men. And they decided that this was not justice but conspiracy.
The campaign spread fast. Videos appeared. In one, a man called the judge by a slur reserved for Muslim women. He warned of bloodshed across the state and the country if the fourteen convicts were not freed within ten days. A man from Surat repeated the threat. An effigy of the judge was set alight. A television editor called the verdict a judicial lynching and stood with the families of the convicted. Online accounts demanded her suspension and asked that every judgment she had ever delivered be reopened.
Read that demand again. They want her past undone because of her religion. They want a sitting judge removed because she did the one thing a judge is meant to do. She applied the law to the facts without fear. The Madhya Pradesh Police have registered a first information report. That is a start. But an FIR against unknown persons is not protection. It is a file. The judge needs more than a file. She needs the State to stand visibly between her and the men who threaten her. A sessions judge needs what another judge, who has retired from a High Court has just been given.
Consider the case of Justice Gautam Patel. Justice Patel sat on the Bombay High Court. In April 2024, in his last days on the bench, he delivered a judgment in the long dispute over the leadership of the Dawoodi Bohra community. He upheld Syedna Mufaddal Saifuddin as the rightful spiritual head. Then he retired. The judgment displeased some. For nearly a year, threats followed. Anonymous letters reached him. His family, settled abroad, faced an attempted burglary, threatening messages, and an assault on his daughter in London. British police opened an investigation.
Last month, three bar bodies went to the Bombay High Court. The Bombay Bar Association, the Advocates Association of Western India, and the Bombay Incorporated Law Society filed a public interest litigation. They asked the court to protect one of their own.
The court listened. On 15 June, a bench led by the Acting Chief Justice directed the Maharashtra government to ensure protection for Justice Patel and his family. It told the Mumbai Police Commissioner to supervise the investigation personally. It demanded a status report. The senior advocate for the bar bodies put the principle in a single sentence. The threat, he said, was not to Justice Patel alone. It was to the entire judiciary. A message had to be sent that the courts would not take such threats lightly.
The bench agreed in its own words. A judge who has done his duty and demitted office is facing this, it observed. The governments must act swiftly. His protection is most important. That is the standard. Now apply it.
Tabassum Khan did her duty. She convicted men who killed an innocent traveller on a dark road. She did not flinch from naming the crime. For this she is hunted by mobs and slurred in public. If a retired judge of a High Court deserves State protection and judicial supervision of his case, so does a serving sessions judge in a district town. The principle cannot bend to rank. It cannot bend to religion. It cannot bend to the political weather around a particular verdict.
There is, in truth, a stronger case for her. Justice Patel has retired. He has the standing of a former High Court judge and the attention that brings. Tabassum Khan still sits. She must walk into the same courthouse tomorrow and the day after. She must hear the next case while a crowd outside calls for the release of the men she convicted. She has no choice but to keep working under threat. A serving judge under siege is a more urgent problem than a retired one, not a lesser one.
There is also the matter of who threatens her, and why. Justice Patel was threatened over a succession dispute within a community. Tabassum Khan is threatened over the one thing the State exists to prevent. She punished a lynching. The men who menace her are, in plain terms, demanding the right to kill without consequence. They want her removed so that the killing of Nazir Ahmed costs nobody anything. If the State hesitates here, it tells every future mob that a judge can be frightened into silence. It tells every future victim that the law will look away.
The danger is not abstract. Effigies have burned. Deadlines have been set. Slurs have been broadcast. The Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre served one offender a notice and asked him to delete his video. A notice is not a deterrent. It is a courtesy. The State cannot answer threats of bloodshed with a request to take down a clip.
So the path is clear, and it has already been walked once this month. A court should take up the matter, as the Bombay High Court did. The Madhya Pradesh High Court or the Supreme Court itself can do for Tabassum Khan what the Bombay High Court did for Justice Patel. It can direct the State to provide protection at her home and at her court. It can place the investigation under the personal supervision of a senior officer. It can demand a status report by a fixed date. It can treat the threats as what they are, an attack on the judiciary itself, and not as the private misfortune of one judge.
The bar should act too. Lawyers in Madhya Pradesh should do what their colleagues in Mumbai did. They should stand up for the judge before whom they appear. An independent judiciary is the working condition of an honest bar. When a judge is threatened for a just verdict, every advocate has a stake in her safety. A judge applied the law without fear. The least the State owes her is the freedom to keep doing so. Even after retirement, Justice Patel was given protection . Tabassum Khan must be given it too, to continue judging without fear or favour.
Author is a Senior Advocate, Supreme Court of India. Views Are Personal