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Video Editor: Mohd Irshad Alam
Friends, Indians, country-people, lend me your ears.
I come to bury the idea of an independent judiciary, not to praise how independent our courts and judges were in the past.
The evil that the Supreme Court did during the Emergency lives on after those judges retired, a reminder of how easily Indira Gandhi bent the mighty court to her will.
The good principles like protection of fundamental rights, Rule of Law and separation of powers that the Constitution gave us, that the courts once upheld, have been interred by governments of every party, and by judges who have ignored propriety and the law.
So let it be with the idea of judicial independence.
The Hon’ble former Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi was nominated to be a member of Rajya Sabha by the President on Monday, 16 March.
The Hon'ble judge's defenders have told you this is not new, that former CJI Ranganath Misra became a Rajya Sabha MP in 1998 as a Congress candidate.
That former Supreme Court judge Baharul Islam resigned from the court to become a Rajya Sabha MP in 1983 after giving a favourable judgment to a Congress CM.
These are true. And they were grievous faults.
And grievously has the independence of India's judiciary been damaged by these incidents.
After all, as former BJP Union Minister and legal luminary Arun Jaitley said in 2012,
What was wrong then can surely not be considered right now, can it?
Here, with all due respect to ex-CJI Ranjan Gogoi and the rest of the judges of the Supreme Court –
For Ranjan Gogoi is an honourable man;
So are they all, all honourable men (pretty much, given how few women judges we have in the SC);
Come I to speak at the funeral of the idea of an independent judiciary.
An independent judiciary would have not let the Alok Verma case drag on for months till the former CBI director had to retire and therefore render the court's verdict meaningless.
But CJI Gogoi did.
And Ranjan Gogoi is an honourable man.
An independent judiciary would have urgently heard the cases on restrictions in Kashmir and the habeas corpus petitions of prisoners detained after the abrogation of Article 370.
Would have interrogated the actions of the government, assessed whether the law was being followed, ensured fundamental rights were not being violated.
When a judiciary is independent, it is concerned about the civil liberties of individuals, it doesn't ask detained political prisoners why they want to move around in the cold in Srinagar.
An independent judiciary should be made of sterner stuff than a willingness to accept any and every bit of unverified, unsigned and misleading information from the government in a sealed cover, like in the Rafale case.
But CJI Gogoi found nothing wrong with sealed covers. CJI Gogoi said he had to hear the Ayodhya case and thus, had no time to deal with Kashmir, and that habeas corpus petitions could be addressed by “allowing” friends of prisoners to visit them.
And Ranjan Gogoi is an honourable man.
You all did see when the former CJI was accused of sexual harassment, who also claimed her and her family’s victimisation afterward:
An independent judiciary would never have allowed the judge accused of sexual harassment to use the court as a forum to defend himself and smear his accuser.
Yet, CJI Gogoi thought this was a witch-hunt;
And, sure, Ranjan Gogoi is an honourable man.
I speak not to disprove what CJI Gogoi spoke,
but here I am to speak what we do know.
You all did love the idea of an independent judiciary once, not without cause:
What cause stops you from recognising that whatever was left of even the idea of an independent judiciary has now been lost?
O judgment! Actually, all the judgments not passed.
Like the Sabarimala review petition, which was referred to a larger bench even though CJI Gogoi found nothing wrong in law or fact with the original verdict.
Bear with me;
And we must all pause till something is done to stop these kind of post-retirement rewards and sinecures for judges, whether a ban or a cooling-off period, or else, as BJP Union Minister Nitin Gadkari said back in 2012,
(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)
Published: 18 Mar 2020,12:31 PM IST