"The concept of Just and Unjust is contextual. What was just a year back, may turn out to be unjust in today's context. Changing context should be constantly under scrutiny to prevent miscarriage of justice." Examine the above statement with suitable examples

(a) Just and unjust is contextual — under scrutiny

Context is not a licence to call atrocity a culture. It is the honest admission that facts, knowledge and constitutional meaning move. Section 377 as enforced against consenting adults was long treated as “public morality”; Navtej Johar read dignity and said the old justice was unjust. Triple talaq as instant private power failed equality. Sedition’s colonial use against a slogan sits badly beside a republic of free speech, which is why the Court paused it and the BNS recast the idea. Aadhaar as inclusion became exclusion when a biometric failure was treated as a moral failure of the hungry. COVID lockdown that saved lungs could still starve a migrant; the just aim needed a just means (food, trains, wages).

Scrutiny is the ethical engine: Parliament, courts, social audit, journalism, and an officer who revisits a circular. Without scrutiny, context-talk becomes relativism (“everyone took a cut that year”). With only rigidity, justice becomes ancestor worship. Aristotle’s equity already knew that a general rule can miss this person. Rawls asks us to test institutions as if we might be the least advantaged in the new context. A civil servant prevents miscarriage by recording why the old template no longer fits, not by quietly inventing a private Constitution.

(b) Form, substance, and true intent

Form is the application window, the affidavit, the GFR clause, the two-witness box. It exists to stop theft and whim. Mindless addiction to it is when a widow is turned away because a stamp is 2 mm small, when MGNREGA is closed for a portal glitch, when anticipatory bail is a ritual and liberty is not. The substance is the purpose: food, work, a fair trial, a living river.

A perceptive civil servant reads the intent of the NFSA, FRA, or a disaster-relief order and uses residual discretion that the law actually gives — a manual override with a record, a site inspection instead of a paper pond, a speaking order that a court can test. This is not “ignore the Act because I am kind”. Kindness that breaks a safeguard is how a nephew’s firm enters. The skill is purposive interpretation (as courts say), equity within jurisdiction, and escalation when the form is unlawful. Kautilya wanted watchmen; Gandhi wanted the poorest face. The perceptive officer holds both: intent of the weak, form that still binds the strong.