My follower base here is a few hundred geeky coders who love making apps, but friends, please listen, today history is being made, and take your heads out of your macbooks and gaming laptops and dark themed IDEs and RGB lit keyboards - and pay attention to this.

If you don't have enough background - @pbhushan1 - an eminent lawyer of our country, posted the photo of the Chief Justice of our Country riding a 50 lakh motorcycle owned by a member of the ruling party.
While nothing wrong in riding a bike - it is not a great image.

The Judiciary is supposed to look neutral, be independent and any association with any political party tarnishes its image as the "supreme" body that oversees the process of upholding of the letter of law in our country. That perception is important.

This is the reason you'll never find the CJI and the PM in the same photo frame except at swearing in. This is the reason judges can never be seen to be "close", even at a personal level, to any person from the executive or legislative branch.

Now, what @pbhushan1 did was simply post that photo (he had not even taken it) and mentioned the fact that the bike belonged to a politician. Just a commentary.

Somehow, this ruffled the feathers so much that the court decided this amounted to an attack on its authority.

Indian has an archaic law called "contempt of court" - which helps the court enforce its orders - because not following the orders of the court itself can land you in jail and hence it gives the court the authority to give orders like "return this piece of land"

But this law also conflates the idea of the "image of the court", in a sense that, apart from disobeying court's orders, even other gestures considered to undermine the "authority" of the court or disrespect it is also punishable by it. In most countries this isn't the case.

Nevertheless, the Supreme Court of India found @pbhushan1 "guilty" of attacking an institution as mighty as itself with just a tweet, which had a photo.

If this photo was so objectionable, I guess the activity captured in it shouldn't have happened in the first place?

This caused an outrage never seen before, both inside and outside India - and more importantly, the biggest experts of democracy and constitutional law across the *world* commented on how this action was proving a downfall of independent and fair judiciary in India.

More than that - this caused a "Streisand Effect" - the case against @pbhushan1 gave his lawyer #DushyantDave a window to argue his case and in fact utter every sentence against the SC earlier thought impossible, inside the very premises of the court.

The court was ruling on a case against itself - putting itself in the most foolish of spots. Every argument brought up more and more mud right against itself, up until the point, the judges realised, this isn't helping anyone.

But, still they found @pbhushan1 guilty and then gave a separate date for his "sentencing" - i.e. the quantum of punishment. They wanted to guage the mood of the nation in this window.

The mood of the nation was this - the SC wasn't un-criticizable anymore.

So the court now wanted to get out of the mess it created and asked @pbhushan1 to apologize and let the matter rest at this.

But @pbhushan1 had smelt the fragrance of a sweet victory of his principles here, and he stood his ground and said he wont apologize.

Stuck in this extremely complex situation - where the court has already found him guilty, but unable to actually punish him, for the backlash it will generate and degrade it's stature even further, the court has finally given @pbhushan1 (but actually itself) an exit route.

The Supreme Court of India has asked @pbhushan1 to pay a fine of Re. 1 for being guilty of shaking the foundations of the uppermost judicial body of the world's largest democracy via a single tweet.

A fitting punishment for a fitting crime.