A healthy debate

On more than one occasion, Vice President Jagdeep Dhankar raised his concern about public posturing by judges from judicial platforms. He frowned upon what to him to be a judicial overreach, as also activism. Vice President Dhankar observed that parliamentary sovereignty and independence hold the key to the survival of democracy and they cannot be watered down by the executive or judiciary. Mr. Dhankar flagged the landmark 1973, Kesavananda Bharati case judgment, which laid out the basic structure of the Constitution, and remarked that it had set a bad precedent. He added that if any authority questioned the power of the Parliament to amend the Constitution, then it would be difficult to call ourselves a democratic nation. The Vice President also criticised the scrapping of the National Judicial Appointments Commission (NJAC) act in 2015 by the apex court. He saw it as something unparalleled in the democratic history of the world. In his opening address as Rajya Sabha chairman, Mr. Dhankhar expressed similar views. The Law Minister Kiren Rijiju, on Monday, wrote to the Chief Justice of India, DY Chandrachud seeking the inclusion of government representatives in the Supreme Court-created collegium system for the selection of judges. The idea behind the government proposal is set to be bringing about a greater measure of transparency and public accountability in the recruitment process of constitutional court justices. There has been criticism that the collegium system of selection of judges is shrouded in opacity.In November 2011, justice, Ruma Pal commented that “the process by which a judge is appointed to a superior court is one of the best-kept secrets in this country.” She pointed out that the “consensus within the collegium is sometimes resolved through a trade-off resulting in dubious appointments with disastrous consequences for the litigants and credibility of the judicial system.” She also referred to growing sycophancy and lobbying within the system in a criticism of the collegium system. Critics of the government see in Vice President, Dhankhar’s remarks, and the Law Minister’s letter to the CJI, an attempt by the Narendra Modi government to make a backdoor entry into judicial appointments. The Congress leader and former law minister P Chidambaram responded to Vice President Dhankar’s comments saying that it was not the Parliament but the Constitution which is supreme. Retired Supreme Court judge, Justice Madan Lokur, described the matter as serious and saw in this, the Modi government’s attempt at getting a committed judiciary. He said that this thrust needed to be pushed back. AAP leader and Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal described the Law Minister’s letter as extremely dangerous and added that there should be no government interference in judicial appointments. Reacting sharply to Kejriwal’s tweet, Kiren Rijiju quipped that was a precise follow-up action of the direction of the Supreme Court Constitution bench while striking down the NJAC act. The bench had then issued a direction to restructure the MoP of the collegium system, he added. Meanwhile, as is the case in such a scenario, many other voices have joined the fray, with lawyers, activists, and journalists from the opposition criticising the government on this move, while a large section of the people and many other analysts feel that this is a step in the right direction. It remains to be seen how the situation will unfold in the weeks to come.