For centuries, Indian legal writing has worn the borrowed robes of colonial draftsmanship — “notwithstanding anything contained hereinabove,” “the party of the first part,” “hereinafter referred to as.” These phrases once signalled precision and authority. Today, they signal something else: a widening gap between the law and the people it governs. As India’s courts, legislature, and legal profession increasingly grapple with questions of access to justice, the debate between legalese and plain language has moved from an academic curiosity to a pressing drafting imperative.
1. The Legacy of Legalese in Indian Law
India inherited its drafting conventions largely from British colonial administration, and much of that inheritance remains intact more than seven decades after independence. Statutes still favour long, unbroken sentences studded with provisos, “notwithstanding” clauses, and Latin maxims. Contracts continue to open with recitals like “WHEREAS the parties hereto are desirous of entering into an agreement” before saying, in effect, “the parties want to sign a contract.” Even long titles of legislation routinely append the phrase “and for matters connected therewith or incidental thereto” — a formula whose function nobody quite defends but which nobody dares remove.
This is not merely stylistic conservatism. Legalese in India persists because of what might be called the “obsession with precedent”: drafters replicate the phrasing of earlier statutes and contracts because that phrasing has survived judicial scrutiny, and departing from it feels risky. A clause that has been tested in court, even if impenetrable to a lay reader, is treated as safer than a clearer one that has not. This produces a ratchet effect — each generation of drafters adds complexity but rarely subtracts it, since removing an old clause feels riskier than repeating it.
The costs of this approach are well documented. Legislation is frequently criticised for provisions that are technically valid but practically unreadable to the citizens they bind. Gendered language, archaic terms, and foreign phrases persist in statutes dealing with everyday matters — property, tenancy, consumer protection — areas where ordinary people, not just lawyers, are expected to understand their rights and obligations. Given that India is a multilingual democracy of over a billion people, and that “ignorance of the law is no excuse” remains a foundational legal maxim, the readability of law is not a cosmetic concern; it goes to the heart of whether citizens can meaningfully know and exercise their rights.
Contracts suffer a parallel problem. Commercial agreements drafted in dense legalese are often just as opaque to the businesspeople who sign them as they are to consumers signing standard-form agreements — insurance policies, loan documents, terms of service — where genuine comprehension is functionally absent. The result is a widening trust deficit between drafters (whether government or private) and the people bound by what they draft.
2. The Plain Language Movement and Its Indian Response
Globally, the plain language movement has reshaped legal drafting over the last few decades. Jurisdictions such as New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, and Germany have undertaken structured projects to rewrite legislation in clearer language — the UK’s Tax Law Rewrite Project being a notable example, which restated direct tax law in shorter sentences and modern vocabulary without altering legal substance. The underlying premise is straightforward: clarity and legal precision are not opposites. A rule can be exact and still be written so an intelligent non-lawyer can follow it.
India’s engagement with this movement has been slower but is gathering momentum. The Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy released a Manual on Plain Language Drafting, setting out structural and linguistic guidelines for simplifying statutes — from the ordering of chapters and definitions to the treatment of provisos and foreign terms. This was followed by the SARAL Manual, which frames plain drafting around four principles: that legal documents should be Simple, Accessible, Rational, and Actionable. The SARAL framework is deliberately designed to travel beyond legislation into rules, regulations, judgments, and private contracts, offering a checklist-based approach adapted specifically to the Indian legal context rather than imported wholesale from other jurisdictions.
At the legislative level, the Drafting of Law in Plain Language Bill, 2018, introduced as a private member’s bill in the Lok Sabha, sought to mandate that government Bills and Acts be drafted in plain, clear language. While the Bill did not proceed to enactment, its introduction signalled an official acknowledgment that the status quo needed re-examination. The judiciary, too, has periodically weighed in on access to justice as encompassing comprehensibility of law, reinforcing that legal communication is not incidental to justice delivery but constitutive of it.
Despite these efforts, plain language drafting in India remains more aspiration than institutional norm. Unlike jurisdictions with dedicated legislative drafting offices bound by plain-language mandates, India has no binding requirement that statutes or rules be tested for readability before enactment. Advocacy by organisations such as Vidhi continues to fill this gap, but voluntary reform, however well-researched, cannot substitute for systemic change embedded in legislative and judicial practice.
3. What Modern Drafting Demands Going Forward
Modern Indian drafting — whether of statutes, contracts, or judgments — needs to treat clarity as a professional obligation rather than a stylistic preference. Several shifts follow from this.
First, drafters must distinguish precision from complexity. A sentence can retain full legal force while being restructured into shorter, active-voice constructions, with defined terms used consistently and provisos converted into separate, clearly labelled sub-clauses. The SARAL and Vidhi manuals both demonstrate, through redrafting exercises, that existing laws can be rewritten in simpler form without any loss of legal meaning — the complexity was never load-bearing to begin with.
Second, institutional incentives need to change. As long as legal training, judicial citation practice, and client expectations continue to reward dense, precedent-mimicking language as a marker of competence, individual drafters will have little reason to depart from it. Law schools, bar associations, and government drafting departments each have a role in normalising plain language as the professional default rather than the exception.
Third, technology-assisted drafting — increasingly common in both legislative departments and law firms — must be deployed carefully. The ease of reproducing existing text, whether in contracts or judgments, has arguably entrenched legalese further, since copy-paste drafting reproduces old formulations faster than it questions them. Modern tools should be used to simplify, not simply to replicate.
Ultimately, the case for plain language is not that legalese is wrong, but that it has outlived its justification. In a jurisdiction where access to justice depends on citizens actually understanding the rules that bind them, drafting that only lawyers can decode is a structural barrier, not a professional virtue. The frameworks now exist — SARAL, the Vidhi manuals, comparative models from other common-law jurisdictions. What remains is the harder task of institutionalising them, so that clarity becomes the default expectation of Indian legal drafting rather than a reform perpetually deferred.
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