INDIA: Reforms Put in Place as More Judges End up in the Dock

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, May 14 2003 (IPS) - When Indian federal sleuths arrived at the home of civil judge S S Bharadwaj on the weekend to arrest him on corruption charges, he asked to use an upstairs toilet, shimmied down a tree and escaped.

The pictures of Bharadwaj, of Chandigarh in Punjab state, are now plastered all over northern India. He was caught red-handed accepting 15,000 U.S. dollars in cash as protection money for ‘fixing’ police cases pending before R M Gupta, district and sessions judge in Punjab’s Jalandhar district.

The two judges had, according to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), colluded with local police officials to extort about 30,000 dollars from an accused man.

Samra’s case would undoubtedly strengthen the hand of legal experts and activists who lobbied for the introduction of a National Judicial Commission. The commission, introduced this month, would screen aspirants to the judiciary for probity and prevent the entry of people who use political connections to make up for lack of competence and integrity.

”Bad appointments produce bad judges,” said constitutional expert and eminent Supreme Court lawyer Rajeev Dhawan. He cited a joke making the rounds of the legal fraternity, which goes: ”It does not matter if you do not know the law as long as you know the law minister.”

A case in point is the May 2001 appointment of Punjab and Haryana high court judge Adarsh Kumar Goel, better known for his membership in the pro-Hindu group Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) than for either integrity or competence.

K R Narayanan, then president of India, withheld approval for Goel’s appointment, but in the end was forced to follow constitutional propriety and accept the political decision favouring Goel.

This month’s decision by the central government to introduce the National Judicial Commission was prompted by the recent arrest of a former judge of the Delhi High Court, Shameet Mukherjee. He was caught by the CBI through tape-recorded telephone intercepts demanding money and women to fix a land-grab case.

But the new five-member commission restores political control of the judiciary. It will consist, apart from the three top judges of the Supreme Court, the law minister and an appointee of the prime minister rather than the president as originally envisaged.

”This is like feeding milk to the cat,” said Dhawan, who wants a larger National Judicial Commission that includes the leader of the opposition, and three public persons appointed by the president.

Meanwhile, Mukherjee, who was released on bail on Tuesday on humanitarian grounds after spending two weeks in custody, plans to fall back on the Judges Protection Act, which provides judges immunity from prosecution. It would seem that judges can take refuge behind a panoply of laws and provisions such as those concerning contempt, which they are ready to use freely in protecting their own interests rather than that of the public, critics say.

A celebrated victim of contempt laws is anti-big dam activist and Booker Prize-winning author Arundhati Roy, who was jailed for a day last year, and fined for questioning the Supreme Court decision in the controversial construction of the Sardar Sarovar dam across the Narmada river.

Several journalists and editors for leading publications are now facing contempt charges filed against them by the Karnataka high court for publishing reports concerning a drunken brawl by three judges who had female companions with them at a resort in the town of Mysore late last year.

A ‘discreet’ Supreme Court enquiry into the ‘Mysore Judges Sex Scandal’, as the case became known, was ordered only after widespread protests and agitation by members of the Karnataka bar.

There were howls of protest when the three-member enquiry committee, drawn from different high courts, exonerated the judges and the Supreme Court refused to make public the contents of the report. Indian Chief Justice V N Khare said that publicising the report would mean that the inquiry would no longer be ‘discreet’.

Public interest litigation initiated by Indira Jaisingh, a noted women’s rights activist and Supreme Court lawyer, has demanded investigation into the case by a professional investigating agency such as the Central Bureau of Investigation rather than by judges.

But Khare expects the truth to be brought not by the BCI but through the journalists who have appealed in the Supreme Court against the contempt charges they face. ”Truth is the defence in contempt matters and the press should bring before the court the truth,” Khare observed.

Former Indian Law Minister Shanti Bhushan, who argued for Jaisingh, also pleaded that the report on the Mysore sex scandal be made public because the matter was of ”national concern” as the judiciary was regarded as the ”last institution on which the common man relied after the failure of the executive and the legislature”.

”It is in the public interest and the credibility of the judicial system that the report of the committee be made public and the faith of the public in an open, credible and transparent justice administration system be restored,” Bhushan pleaded at the May 6 hearing.