Embarrassing for Courts to Tell Governors to Abide by Law: Justice Nagarathna
Hyderabad: Justice B.V. Nagarathna on Saturday expressed dissatisfaction over the incidents of Governors exceeding administrative limits. She said that the recent trend has been that the Governors have become the point of litigation because of actions like sitting on bills and taking decisions against the constitutional provisions.
Justice Nagarathna cautioned that it was not a healthy trend and quite embarrassing that the courts have to ask the offices of the Governors to discharge their duties in accordance with the law. Citing the instances of such erroneous decisions by the Governors of Maharashtra in 2022, Punjab and other states, the Supreme Court judge hoped for an end to such situations.
Justice Nagarathna was delivering the keynote address on the jurisprudence process in the two-day conference, ‘The Courts and the Constitution’ organised by Nalsar University of Law at their Shamirpet campus.
She also took exception to the manner in which demonetisation was brought about by the Union government in 2016.
“The way it was done was not correct and there is arbitrariness and absence of the consultations and the haste with which it was done...some people say even the then finance minister did not know about it. If India wanted to go from paper currency to plastic currency, surely, demonetisation was not a reason for that,” Justice Nagarathna noted.
Reminding that 98 per cent of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 currency notes had come back to the RBI and disagreeing with the contentions that demonetisation was meant to eradicate black money, Justice Nagarathna contended that it was the way to convert black money into white and getting unaccounted money into accounted money, thereafter.
Incidentally, Justice Nagarathna was in the five-member constitutional bench handling the demonetisation and she had given a dissenting opinion.
Justice Sapana Pradhan Malla, judge of the Supreme Court of Nepal and Justice Syed Mansoor Ali Shah of the Supreme Court of Pakistan, Telangana High Court Chief Justice Alok Aradhe, who is also Nalsar University Chancellor, Vice-Chancellor Prof. Srikrishna Deva Rao, Justice S. Ravindra Bhat, former judge of the Supreme Court, addressed the inaugural session.