Indian
SC Warned: Who Will Judge Our Judges
By
Punyapriya Dasgupta
NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court has confirmed that its comparison
with Nero is intended to be seen as a brand on those responsible
for the communal carnage in Gujarat two years ago – the
worst of its kind in independent India.
True,
the apex court has not identified the persons it had in mind but
nobody will have any difficulty in recognizing Gujarat Chief Minister
Narendra Modi as the principal protagonist. If the two-judge bench
of Justice Doraiswamy Raju and Justice Arijit Pasayat chose to
refer, in plural, to “modern day Neros” it was to
give Mr Modi the comfort of the company of those he had managed
to turn into his accomplices.
A
standard reference book, Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrases
and Fables, identifies Nero as “any bloody-minded man,
relentless tyrant, or evil-doer of extraordinary cruelty; from
the depraved and infamous Roman Emperor C. Claudius Nero (AD 37,
54-68), whom contemporaries believed to be the instigator of the
great fire that destroyed most of Rome in AD 64, and to have recited
his own poetry and played his lyre while enjoying the spectacle.
Nero blamed the Christians.”
For
whatever happened under his watch in Gujarat, Narendra Modi blamed
the Muslims. The Modi government approached the Supreme Court
for expunction of the Nero parallel and got only another stinging
censure. India’s highest law court does not think that the
guilty men in Gujarat merit forgiveness. They are responsible
for deliberate rapes, murders and burnings followed by calculated
injustice to the victims.
The
Supreme Court has been appalled by the debauching of the justice
delivery system in Gujarat. It characterized the trial court’s
way of dealing with and acquitting all the 21 accused in the horrifying
communal capital crime at the Best Bakery as a “monstrosity”
and castigated the Gujarat High Court for its straying from the
“judicial calm and detachment required of the learned judges”
while hearing an appeal . The judiciary in Gujarat had become
so undependable that the Supreme Court ordered a retrial of the
Best Bakery case outside the State, in Maharashtra.
The words used by the Supreme Court leave no scope for denying
that the failure of the Gujarat High Court was deliberate. And
when that is so, one can argue that this can happen again and
therefore the judges concerned are not fit to remain in office.
The framers of India’s Constitution failed to foresee the
degeneration that would come over the polity in only about half
a century.
They
thought more about appointment of judges than about their removal.
The assumption then was that the Indian higher judiciary would
always have enough inner moral strength to remain incorruptible.
Impeachment of a judge on grounds of misbehavior or incapacity
has been provided for but the process depends on big numbers of
sponsors in the Lok Sabha or the Rajya Sabha and the final approval
on huge majorities in both houses of parliament.
The
effect in practice was seen when a committee of his peers found
Justice V Ramaswamy guilty on several counts of corruption but
the Congress Party led by P V Narasimha Rao ensured the defeat
of the impeachment motion in parliament. Myopic politicians could
not see the nation’s interest.
When
corruption is growing rank all around us it is illogical to expect
that the judiciary can stay immune from the evil. The decline
is visible. Examples: in a case in Delhi a former High Court judge
was outwitted into resigning and is facing a charge of collusion
with a land shark. In Chandigarh several judges thought that their
free membership of a none-too-tidy golf club should not have been
questioned by their chief. Rumors were heard recently of gallivanting
by some judges of another High Court.
A
former Chief Justice of India, SP Bharucha, said a few years ago
that while about 20% of the judges in India had become corrupt,
there was virtually no way to discipline the black sheep in the
Supreme Court or the High Courts. Justice V N Khare, who retired
as the chief two weeks ago, put the question crisply : “Who
will judge the judges?”
The
Indian judiciary supposedly treats all citizens as equals but
the judges of the Supreme Court and the High Courts are, in Orwellian
language, more equal than others. Their conduct in the discharge
of their duties cannot be discussed even by India’s parliament
except on a motion of impeachment.
And
under a ruling in the case concerning Justice K Veeraswamy of
the Madras High Court and the CBI’s discovery of a huge
amount of money in 1991, investigation of suspected wrongdoing
by a member of the higher judiciary can only be done with prior
permission from the Chief Justice of India. There are also the
laws of contempt which permit anyone making a charge against a
judge to be hauled up and tried by the same judge.
Some of the judges themselves have called for reforms to counteract
corruption in the higher judiciary before the problem gets out
of hand. In spite of the din and bustle of the national elections,
the two Supreme Court judgments, within four weeks, in the Best
Bakery case should be treated by the people of India as a loud
warning that the country’s justice delivery system is being
corroded not only by the lure of easy money but the fumes of hate-filled
politics.
It
is no longer enough to discuss judicial reforms in seminars. Doing
something to make the judges accountable and removable without
too much difficulty, whenever necessary, is a task that can be
ignored or postponed if only the nation’s good is kept out
of mind. - Courtesy Deccan Herald
