Don't undermine SC, that would hurt India

There is a bronze statue of a mother and a child on the lawn of the Supreme Court. Made by the famous artist Chintamoni Kar, the mother is Mother India and the young Republic is represented by the symbol of a child upholding the law of the country shown in the form of an open book, with the symbol of the balance representing law and justice.

The statue offers an important symbolic message today.The Supreme Court, as every Indian citizen knows, has served as the final word on some of the most important issues facing the country. Thanks to the court’s enlightened interpretations of Article 21 (life and personal liberty), primarily after the Emergency period, we now have public interest litigation, which has promoted critical economic and social rights, that may not be always enforceable but are constitutionally protected. Examples: the rights to free education, livelihood, a clean environment, and many others. These have helped foster a greater sense of rights consciousness in a nation where most people are still not aware of their rights and opened up avenues for litigation on important issues.

As a citizen of India, I am intensely proud of our Supreme Court and distressed at the barrage of snide remarks hurled at it in recent days. Some of it borders on attempts to pressure the court into taking decisions that resonate with majoritarian sentiment at the cost of other groups.

This is dangerous.Take some of the recent headline-grabbers.

On Monday, soon after the Supreme Court announced that the hearing of the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid land dispute case would be taken up in the first week of January 2019, the Hindutva brigade took to the social media en masse to express displeasure at the court’s ruling in a way that comes across as pressure tactics. They asked the government to opt for the ordinance route and clear the way for early construction of a Ram Mandir in Ayodhya.

Uttar Pradesh CM Yogi Adityanath publicly said “sometimes, justice delayed is justice equivalent to injustice”.

“We have our own priorities,” Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi had said, rejecting an urgent hearing as the UP government argued it was a 100-year-old dispute that should be taken up on priority.

Is a ruling on the Ram temple the most important issue facing the Supreme Court today? Majority sentiment may be inclined a certain way but the court is not meant to only go by what most people feel. There would be no need for courts if popular sentiment alone could adjudicate all matters.

It is also important to note that the Supreme Court has not actually passed any order or verdict in the contentious Ram Janmabhoomi case. It has merely said the matter will be listed in early January to decide the future course.

Take another volatile case — the court’s recent verdict allowing women of all ages to worship at Sabarimala. Women devotees reportedly stopped vehicles at the main gateway to Sabarimala and prevented other women in the 10-50 age group from trekking to the hill shrine, flouting the court’s ruling that the Ayyappa temple was to open for the monthly puja.

What is at stake here?

The notion that menstruating women are impure and polluting, and somehow lesser mortals, is antithetical to the idea of equality and not grounded in science.

Moreover, what is packaged as centuries-old tradition is actually only a few decades old.

“The ban on the entry of women between the ages of 10 and 50 was introduced in 1991 through a court verdict, presuming that menstruation precluded the possibility of their observance of purity for 41 days, and that Ayyappa, a celibate, would not like young women. But there is neither ritual sanctity nor scientific justification for this restriction,” noted Prof. Rajan Gurukkal, an eminent historian and social scientist, and former vice-chancellor of M.G. University, Kottayam, in a recent magazine article.

“It’s true that Savarna households observed menstrual pollution and abstained from entering holy places during their periods,” Gurukkal added, “but menstruation was auspicious and symbolic of fertility for the tribals, who had flocked the temple with their women and children of all age groups till the ’60s. There is also archival evidence of young Savarna women from the Travancore region entering the temple till the ’80s.”

Should faith and tradition be allowed to take precedence over the orders of the Supreme Court? And what happens to the justice system and rule of law in the country if this attitude is normalised and if influential people get away with openly advocating flouting or sidestepping the orders of the Supreme Court?

Faith and religion trigger charged emotions, but as we have seen, neither is cast in stone. Change has happened through judicial orders. One of the most celebrated cases is the one related to the entry of Muslim women into the sanctum sanctorum of Haji Ali shrine in Mumbai to lay flowers or chador. There was a prohibition on this earlier but a petition by the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan paved the way for the removal of restrictions on women’s entry into the shrine. In 2016, in what was seen by many as a victory for equal rights to worship for women, the Haji Ali Dargah Trust conceded before the Supreme Court that it had resolved to allow women to enter the sanctum sanctorum of the famed dargah in Mumbai “at par with men”.

The Supreme Court exists as a last resort of dispensation of justice for all in a hugely diverse country. In carrying out its mandate, it will, and often has, ruled contrary to what is seen as popular sentiment which often influences the decisions of the executive.

Right now, India faces a very important question. As Indians, do we believe in the supremacy of the Supreme Court or not?

The Supreme Court itself has said that data that exposes any lacunae of the judicial system is not tantamount to contempt and is a welcome step forward in self-rectification. But there’s a difference between pointing out lacunae in the judicial system and encouraging people to violate or ignore the orders of the top court. The latter would damage the country’s justice system.

The writer focuses on development issues in India and emerging economies. She can be reached at patralekha.chatterjee@gmail.com