Mass hysteria over CJI and future of judiciary
The BJP has thanked Vice President M Venkaiah Naidu for rejecting the Opposition bid to impeach Chief Justice of India (CJI) Dipak Misra, forgetting that the Vice President is above partisan loyalties to the BJP – of which he once formed a part. After all, Naidu was part of Narendra Modi’s cabinet. Before that, he was a loyal cabinet minister of former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Whether his decision was legally correct or not is debatable.
Naidu took the precaution of being advised by top notch legal and judicial minds who unanimously opined the impeachment motion must be rejected. Soon after, two senior judges of the Supreme Court, Justices Madan Lokur and the next CJI Ranjan Gogoi wrote to Dipak Misra to convene a full-court meeting to discuss the “future of the Supreme Court”. They joined brother judges Jasti Chelameswar and Kurien Joseph who all voiced fears that the Modi government was undermining judicial independence. But as always, the CJI took no notice. For our CJI Dipak Misra sees no evil, hears no evil and speaks no evil of the ruling BJP government whose views he may share. And now, it looks like he will retire without being impeached for allegedly assigning cases to benches of his choice, if Justice Chelameswar, Gogoi et al are to be believed. But they may never be believed.
Justice P B Sawant, who retired from the Supreme Court in 1995, has also claimed in a letter that governors (and perhaps by implication a Vice President) act like employees of the Central government which was why “democracy is really in danger.” So, our senior judges are being demonised for speaking up while a CJI like Dipak Misra, who is as silent as a sphinx, is deified by an exultant BJP and its allies. Asaram Bapu is the first swami to be convicted for rape while others who allegedly orchestrated communal crimes such as Sadhvi Pragya Thakur and Maya Kodnani have been acquitted by the judiciary at various levels. Soon after her release, the Sadhvi declared in Gujarat that the Kathua murder was converted into a rape to implicate Hindus. The BJP allows the Sadhvi unbridled freedom of speech which it has denied to the national media.
An attempt to gag the media from reporting the CJI’s impeachment was dismissed by the Supreme Court. Earlier, an assistant sessions judge “Twinkle” Wadhwa gagged the media from reporting criminal proceedings against an allegedly corrupt high court judge, IMQud du si, who was an accused in the medical colleges scam. In Goa, an assistant sessions judge Sayonara Teles Lad has gagged the media from reporting witnesses’ names in a brutal rape-and-murder of a foreign national.
But much earlier, a bench headed by CJI Misra quashed an order of Justice Chelameswar setting up a five-judge bench of the seniormost judges to hear petitions demanding a probe into the attempt to bribe apex court judges in which the CJI was implicated. By overturning an order of his seniormost colleague, Justice Chelameswar, the CJI lowered the prestige of his high office and then did damage control by hearing all sensitive matters himself with his junior colleagues, AM Khanw ilka rand DY Chandrachud, who declared the CJI as the sole custodian of Constitutional trust.
Judge Twinkle Wadhwa declared that the media had no business lowering Quddusi’s image even after the CBI arrested him for allegedly plotting to allow derecognised medical colleges to start functioning. After all, he was a retired high court judge whose reputation had to be protected at all costs. When the media is gagged, we deify a few corrupt judges like Quddusi and obnoxious film stars like Salman Khan who have a massive fan following.
The U S state department has stated in its Annual Human Rights Report on India that the Modi government has come down hard on media outlets which criticise him. There were 54 attacks on journalists, three TV news channels were banned, 45 internet sites were shut down and 45 sedition cases were filed against individual journalists. The CBI raid on the NDTV and exit of Bobby Ghosh from Hindustan Times made a mockery of Article 19 (1) (a) which guarantees all Indian citizens’ freedom of information which junior judges like Twinkle Wadhwa have sought to block.
And so in this mass hysteria to defend CJI Misra, we forget that he is only the first among equals and cannot be placed above the Supreme Court which is the sole repository of Constitutional trust and not the office of the CJI as Justice D Y Chandrachud would wrongly have us believe. The impropriety of a bench headed by the CJI himself deciding on his own powers must be looked at again.
Today, we live in an age where judges appoint themselves in secrecy and designate lawyers such as Fali Nariman as “seniors” so their offspring can adorn the Supreme Court. These judges then interpret the Constitution in a way never envisaged by the founding fathers to declare themselves as having divine wisdom while assigning cases to judges of their choice who in turn deliver justice which is seen as injustice by the majority.
Finally, by thwarting the media from publishing news of judges like Quddusi, judicial officers like Twinkle Wadhwa are protecting the corrupt and denying all citizens their right to know. The acquittal of Maya Kodnani by the Gujarat high court of the Narodia Patia massacre in 2002 is part of a long chain of acquittals of all saffron brigade ultras which has made some people lose faith in the judiciary.