Don't choke the judiciary

The observations of the three-member Supreme Court bench led by Chief Justice of India T.S. Thakur last Friday can leave little room for doubt that the Modi government has not deemed it proper to maintain a relationship of equanimity with the judiciary. While Justice Thakur has been complaining repeatedly and bitterly about the government showing no inclination to fill judicial vacancies at the High Court level, this government’s discord with the higher judiciary goes back to the time of CJI H.L. Dattu, Justice Thakur’s predecessor. Prime Minister Narendra Modi had then openly suggested that judicial pronouncements and observations tended to be coloured by the perceptions of “five-star activists”. Probably he had in mind the work done by Teesta Setalvad, who did much to expose the Gujarat communal carnage cases, and Priya Pillai of Greenpeace. To put not too fine a point on it, this appears to amount to an accusation of being motivated. Since then, the government has quite simply ignored pleas to fill High Court vacancies based on recommendations of the Supreme Court collegium.

As the top court stated yet again on Friday, the government was not even sending back collegium recommendations or raising questions about any of them. Quite simply, it is resorting to the device of maintaining a studied silence. This is beginning to look like a strategy. In the process, the course of justice is not on course. Forty lakh cases have piled up in the High courts which are working at 40 per cent of their sanctioned strength. The CJI angrily said that the entire judiciary cannot be brought to a grinding halt. “Court rooms are locked down. Do you want to lock down the institution of the judiciary as well?” an exasperated court asked Attorney-General Mukul Rohatgi. The court refused to accept the A-G’s plea that the Memorandum of Procedure (MoP) for judicial appointments was yet to be given assent by the Supreme Court. The bench said the law minister and the Union cabinet had given the assurance that the non-formulation of the MoP would not cause judicial appointments to be stalled.

The top court said that the largest High Court in the country, Allahabad, had a sanctioned strength of 165 but its current strength lay at 77. An entire floor in the Karnataka High Court was locked up because judges' chambers had no occupants. Justice Thakur noted that in the recent months the collegium had made 88 recommendations for HC judges, but these have been quite simply disregarded. It can only be hoped that the judiciary is not being treated like the media, which was referred to by a minister as “presstitutes”.