Judiciary: Time to reset the Lakshman Rekha

By Vivekanand Jha*

By superseding scores of senior judges and elevating the juniormost judge, Justice A.N.Ray as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had sent out a message to the judiciary: if you become a pliant judge, your elevation and promotion was guaranteed or else, if you take to upholding the gravity of judiciary, where her political interest was jeopardised, she would react with a vengeance as she did with judges who voted against the amendment of basic structure of the constitution.

Unequivocally, Indira took Siddhartha Shankar Ray, the then Chief Minister of West Bengal, her trusted protege, with her to the then President, Fakhruddin Ali Ahmad to sign the Presidential Proclamation for imposing the emergency upon the nation, ignoring the then Union law minister, was the vindication of Indira’s condescending mindset towards the so-called sacrosanct system. ‘Indira is India, India is Indira’, the panegyrics penned by the then Congress President late Dev Kant Barooah, injected an overwhelming sense of hubris in Indira about her indispensability. 

With the passage of decades down the line, the System in India stood corrupted from all sides. The judiciary was no exception to this.

The current controversy has been stirred by Justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay of Calcutta High Court. He as a former judge, speaking to the media, professes to have been in touch with a political party in the course of his tenure as a sitting judge. Such revelations indict the judiciary in no ambiguous terms. Justice Gangopadhyay goes on singing panegyrics for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s leadership skills, which smacks of the institutionalisation of a new trend in the judiciary where the judges are prepared to kowtow to politicians to curry their favours, invariably brings the curtain down on so-called gravity of law sparing none. The so-called high and mighty who had only the judiciary to fear, subsequently will be insulated from the last deterrent, the judiciary.

The Lakshman Rekha needs to be reset here: Judges cannot join any political party straightway walking after retirement. There should be a mandatory cooling-off period for their joining politics and contesting elections.

Justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay had set an alarming trend: jumping from one bandwagon to another, tantamount to undermining the very spirit of the judiciary.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is equally guilty of the emasculation of the System, just for the sake of its stranglehold over the polity. Hence against the backdrop, notwithstanding West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s myriad omissions and commissions, she might not be faulted for alleging a collusion between Justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay and the BJP, especially when he is very likely to contest the general election of 2024.

Almost over a decade ago, there was some public spat between the former judge of the Supreme Court, Justice Ashok Kumar Ganguly and the ex-Speaker of Lok Sabha, Somnath Chatterjee on the ‘role of the modern judge’. Significantly, Somnath was critical of Justice Ganguly’s presiding over such judgments which jeopardised the channelisation of millions of dollars to India, which, Somnath argued, could have created huge potential for job prospects back in India, had Justice Ganguly been considerate.

Justice Ganguly, by way of straightforward rejection of Somnath’s contention, had categorically sought to establish the fact that the role of judges was to ensure that the verdict was delivered strictly as per the spirit of the law, no matter, in the process. Unequivocally, it is the parameter of the duty of judges as spiritedly sought to be portrayed by Justice Ganguly, which has come to the real test when the Indian judiciary continues to face a credibility crisis in contemporary India.

*Vivekanand Jha is an Author, Academician and Public Intellectual. The views expressed are personal.