http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/sunday-toi/special-report/A-few-just-men-who-raised-the-bar/articleshow/5936089.cms
A few just men who raised the bar
Manoj Mitta, TNN, May 16, 2010, 03.56am IST
K G Balakrishnan, whose tenure as Chief Justice of India ended last
week, was the first Dalit to hold the post. But his time in office was
marked by a near-Brahminical resistance to the transparency triggered
by the Right to Information Act. High court judges across the country,
however, displayed great spunk in standing up to Balakrishnan in a
break from the judiciary's notoriously servile culture.
The unintended consequence of Balakrishnan's style of leadership was
that HC judges had an impact at the national level like never before.
This was not just on issues of accountability but also in the way they
upheld the letter and spirit of the law in the course of their work.
Remember the challenge thrown to Balakrishnan by Justice Shylendra
Kumar of the Karnataka HC and Justice K Kannan of the Punjab and
Haryana high court when they publicly dissented with his line that
disclosure of assets belonging to judges would compromise the
independence of the judiciary? The novelty value was enhanced by the
medium of their revolt: blogs!
The lead taken by Kannan and Kumar, along with Justice K Chandru of
the Madras HC, had a salutary effect. It put pressure on their seniors
in the Supreme Court to disclose their assets. Even as Balakrishnan
accused him of being "publicity-crazy" allegedly for speaking out of
turn, Kumar hit back by calling him "a serpent without fangs". This
was in the context of the bungled move to elevate P D Dinakaran, chief
justice of the Karnataka high court, to the Supreme Court. Kumar
evidently felt justified in such irreverence as the stalemate over
Dinakaran had paralyzed his high court.
Balakrishnan's reluctance to drop Dinakaran's candidature despite
serious charges of corruption and the Supreme Court collegium's
decision to deny promotion to A P Shah, the Delhi HC chief justice who
had made history by decriminalizing homosexuality, exposed the rot in
the system of appointments.
As if that were not bad enough for Balakrishnan, Justice Ravindra Bhat
of the Delhi HC, and then a division bench, comprising Justice Shah
and Justice S Muralidhar, dismissed the Supreme Court's appeals
against the RTI order passed in the assets case by the Central
Information Commission.
Another conscience keeper who ended up damaging Balakrishnan's
reputation, however inadvertently, was Justice R Reghupati of the
Madras HC as he complained in writing about an attempt made by a Union
minister to interfere in a case pending before him. Rather than
ordering an inquiry, Balakrishnan hushed up the affair on the
technicality that Reghupati had not actually spoken to the minister
during the mobile call made from his chamber by a lawyer trying to fix
the case.
Balakrishnan was equally evasive when it came to following up on the
categorical recommendation made by an in-house committee of three
senior HC judges that Justice Nirmal Yadav of the Punjab and Haryana
HC was unfit to remain in office for her alleged complicity in the
cash-for-judge scam. This time he took refuge in the technicality that
the then attorney general had opined that no corruption case had been
made out by CBI against Yadav. Balakrishnan however remained
tightlipped on what had stopped him from taking any administrative
action against Yadav, including the kind of recommendation for
impeachment proceedings he had made to the government against Justice
Sowmitra Sen of the Calcutta high court.
In another mystifying rollback of accountability, Balakrishnan
recommended to the President to bring back the Allahabad HC judges who
had been transferred out in the wake of the Ghaziabad provident fund
scam. All that is known to have changed though since their transfer is
that the main accused in the case, a court employee, died mysteriously
in judicial custody.
Balakrishnan's tenure was redeemed to an extent by a slew of
path-breaking verdicts, not just by Supreme Court judges but also by
their HC counterparts. Just before his retirement, he struck a blow
for human rights by outlawing the practice of forcing out the "truth"
from suspects through narco analysis. Such progressive decisions were
a silver lining to the dark cloud of falling standards in judicial
probity.
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