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No one but the Narendra Modi-led government is responsible for turning country's highly respected institution, the Supreme Court of India, into a divided house and creating a widely-held perception that India is no longer the world's largest democracy under a far-right government which is vastly different from or is more fundamentalist than the BJP-led government of Atal Behari Vajpayee in the late 1990s/early 2000s. It has then added insult to the injury by describing the four senior judges of Supreme Court of India as "leftists". According to a Reuters report, four justices of India's top court on Friday criticized the administration of the court by its chief justice, particularly the distribution of cases to judges and raised concerns about judicial appointments. "The four of us are convinced that unless this institution is preserved and it maintains its equanimity, democracy will not survive in this country," Justice Jasti Chelameswar reportedly told a news conference on the lawns of his home in the Indian capital. The four justices at Friday's news conference - Justice Chelameswar plus Justice Ranjan Gogoi, Justice Madan Lokur and Justice Kurian Joseph - are the most senior after Chief Justice Dipak Misra. Three are scheduled to retire this year, while Gogoi is in line to be the next chief justice, based on seniority. Efforts to alert the chief justice that certain things were not in order and that remedial measures were needed had failed, prompting the news conference, Justice Chelameswar reportedly said. Asked by the media if the chief justice should be impeached, Justice Chelameswar reportedly said, "That's for the nation to decide."
According to analysts, the move points to far-reaching implications for jurists and politicians in the chaotic South Asian democracy where the Supreme Court often sets the agenda on matters of policy and orders measures taken in the public interest. Exposing a rift with Chief Justice Misra, the court's four next highest-ranking judges said the issues involving its administration were serious enough to prompt them to go public. The justices have released a letter they had written to Misra. In it, they mentioned instances of cases with "far-reaching consequences for the nation and the institution" that were selectively assigned by the chief justice without rational "basis for such assignment". All Supreme Court judges should be involved in setting the procedures used to hire and promote judges in all the courts in the country, they added. The judges have not given specific details of their concerns during the press conference, but said "it is an issue of assignment of a case". One of the four judges made it clear that it was related to the case of a lower court judge B. Loya, who died in December 2014 while hearing a high-profile trial. At the time of his death, Loya was hearing a case that accused Amit Shah, the president of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, of ordering extrajudicial killings when he served as home minister under Modi in the state of Gujarat. Shah has since been acquitted of those charges.
The Supreme Court is currently said to be hearing a plea to investigate Loya's death. The Reuters news item has recalled that separately, last November, the chief justice overturned an order by Justice Chelameswar that referred a case to a bench of the five most senior judges. At the time, Justice Misra said he was the "master of the roster".
Regardless of the ploy of the incumbent government, the four judges have successfully pulled the rug from under the Sangh Parivar's feet, forcing it to commit a slew of more blunders in its course of "fire fighting". It is, for example, making attempts, however weak, to play down the enormity of situation either by accusing the opposition Congress party of having a hand in the unprecedented judicial crisis in the 70-year history of independent India or criticizing the four judges who have rebelled against the Chief Justice by describing them as "individuals subscribing to the Marxist doctrine". Unfortunately, however, nothing is working for a party that has been winning state elections after elections since it came to power following the 2014 general elections. No doubt, India's Supreme Court is a house divided after four senior-most judges' revolt against Chief Justice. Pakistan experienced an almost identical crisis in the 1990s. But the country's judiciary has undergone massive transformation for the better since the unceremonious exit of the then Chief Justice of Pakistan, Sajjad Ali Shah.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2018

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