Tribunal may regulate its own procedure, including the discretion not to provide oral hearings at every stage; obligation of natural justice does not always necessitate oral presentations.

1. Introduction:
Before a quasi-judicial authority that self-regulates its procedure, an interlocutory application comes to be considered. The proceedings have been pending for a few years, though the process is summary. The all-pervasive pandemic preventing any physical courts and proximate hearing, the Tribunal wanted the counsel, from Delhi, to file his written submissions. But he insists on oral arguments through a video-link. In the alternative, he wants the matter adjourned until the lockdown is lifted. With the Tribunal's refusal, the petitioner has filed this writ petition.

2. The Question: Before a quasi-judicial Tribunal, with no particular procedural norms, is oral hearing an inviolable facet of natural justice and fair hearing?

3. Procedure: A Friend or a Foe?
Indian legal fraternity's love affair with the procedural codes is legendary; it has transcended the temporal bounds and resisted, to a great extent, the temptation for reform. Though we have borrowed the procedural codes from the British, we can teach them a lesson or two on how inviolable the procedure is, even if the substantive law suffers. In our country, a lawyer's forensic finesse gets measured by his command of the procedural codes. And in most cases-though not in this one-one or the other party engages a counsel for his skills to drag the proceedings. There is a premium in prolonging any judicial proceeding; sometimes the procedural panoply- with all its rigours and rigmaroles-gives the litigant what he could not have, under the substantive law, bargained for. A case in point is Bharat Petroleum Corporation Ltd., v. Champalal Vithuram Jajoo, 2020 SCC OnLine Bom 792.

4. Who else can I quote than the venerable Vivekananda on how we fall into these endless procedural pits and make a virtue of our failure to climb over? He says, “but there is yet time to change our ways. Give up all those old discussions, old fights about things which are meaningless, which are nonsensical in their very nature... grown-up men by hundreds have been discussing for years whether we should drink a glass of water with the right hand or the left, whether the hand should be washed three times or four times, whether we should gargle five or six times. What can you expect from men who pass their lives in discussing such momentous questions as these and writing most learned philosophies on them!” For Vivekananda, it is a “sure sign of softening of the brain when the mind cannot grasp the higher problems of life; all originality is lost, the mind has lost all its str