The Hindu Business Line : Keeping watch over watchmen

“Quis custodiet ipsos custodies?” Who watches over watchmen, asked Juvenal (60-127 A.D.) It is a mockery that, 2000 years later, the question still remains unanswered in respect of India’s judiciary. And that too, despite all the trumpeting of accountability, transparency, checks and balances and the supremacy of the sovereign masters, ‘We, The People’, in a so-called democracy under a written Constitution!

God save India if the judiciary becomes a law unto itself and arrogates to itself the right to indulge in whatever conduct it considers suitable without letting any other agency or institution have a say. The situation in the country in this respect is almost reaching a flashpoint, with the executive and the legislative branches as also the civil society tacitly accepting the judiciary’s claims of being answerable only to itself.

Already, all powers of selection of persons for appointment as judges of the Supreme Court and the High Courts have been taken over by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, with the help of a collegium of two other jusdges. This has been in vogue following a sort of judicial coup staged in terms of judgments in the Supreme Court Advocates on Record Associationvs Union of India (1993) and what has come to be known as the Third Judges case (1998).

No less a person than the former Supreme Court Justice and eminent jurist, Mr V. R. Krishna Iyer, has publicly described the judicial take-over of all appointments as ‘dilatory, arbitrary, and smeared by favourites.’ He was categorical that judicial selection should not be a secret operation.

On May 22, the national TV channels telecast reports of the expensive jaunts round the globe by some Justices of the Supreme Court who flew first-class with their spouses on tax-payers’ hard-earned money combining a few days of official purpose with prolonged periods of sight-seeing.

Advancing tide

The Law Minister, Mr H. R. Bharadwaj, was quoted by the same channels as defending this vigorously as a legitimate practice, since, according to him, Justices also needed relaxation and there was no reason why their spouses should be ‘deprived’ of the opportunity to accompany them. There is, then, the advancing tide of corruption, with a former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court declaring that, in his opinion, only 20 per cent of the judiciary as a whole could be termed honest.

In short, the judiciary, in the name of judicial independence, does not want to have any kind of control over its doings. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Mr K. G. Balakrishnan, sanctified this attitude with the astonishing pronouncement the other day that, being Constitutional authorities, he and the other Justices did not come within the definition of public servants and were totally immune from the operation of the Right to Information Act — a contention that was disputed by Mr V. R. Krishna Iyer, among other legal luminaries.

What is public life in this country coming to? Do public figures giving themselves over to a life of unbridled self-indulgence really form part of a country boasting a culture which held aloft austerity and sacrifice as the touchstones of a true human being?

There is no need to go back to the ancient days of sages and saints. The noble examples of all the freedom heroes from Mahatma Gandhi downwards are still fresh in our memory. Can there be an embodiment of social commitment equal to that of a Vinobha Bhave or Baba Amte? Have those values gone down the drain?

B. S. RAGHAVAN

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