The Judiciary has all the right to overstep its boundaries

The politicians of the day seem to be at loggerheads with the judiciary right and left (recently here, a while ago there) and one can understand what’s their problem: they are not able to wreck havoc with the country as freely as they would like to.

Now, Mr. Somnath Chatterjee has rightly remarked

During the tumultuous period (the Congress-imposed emergency) of our history, the judiciary had left the citizens at the mercy of the executive.

and

It was only the Parliament that restored the basic rights of the people and put in place stronger defences for our democracy through the 44th Constitutional amendment.

He’s also in the right to say that with thousands of cases pending, the judges have no business poking their noses into the affairs of the legislative. The judges are certainly not the harbingers of the ultimate justice. Remember the Bhanwari Devi case where the judge acquitted the upper caste accused simply because “an upper caste man could not have defiled himself by raping a lower-caste woman.”? I don’t remember this moronic, criminally insane judge ever being taken to task by other judges. So no, the judiciary doesn’t have a high moral ground.

But it is the only option the country has. Take it like this: there is this deep sea, my boat is about to capsize and I don’t know how to swim and if I remain in the water I’m surely going to drown. There is an island full of cannibals and I can reach it with my boat, before it capsizes. I’ll certainly go to the island. In our country, the politicians are the sea, and the judiciary is the island with the cannibals. OK, not a palatable analogy.

Here’s another reason why people have more faith in the judiciary. No matter how screwed up some of the judges are, they certainly are not like the politicians. To become a judge, you have to go through proper educational and scholastic channels. There should be no case pending against you. You should have a clean public record. But you can easily become a politician even if you are a criminal, a terrorist, a mafia don, a bahubali, a dacoit, a murderer, or even a rapist. Our good old Shibu became the koyala mantri (the coal minister) even after committing a murder. Modi is a much hated figure in India for obvious reasons and he is still superciliously flaunted as a successful chief minister, without an iota of compunction. Almost all the Congress I ministers that lead and incited the mobs during the 1984 anti-Sikh riots either died without being punished or are still politically active. We all know what the communists recently did in Nandigram. The list can go on and on.

Interestingly, Mr. Chatterjee shows no scruples regarding the fact that 80% ministers in UP have criminal cases against them. Has he ever protested against criminals joining the politics? Or would this threaten our fabric of “democracy”?

So given a choice between the deep sea and the cannibals-ridden island, I think the public is intelligent enough to decide what to choose.