Former union minister says impeachment is not the answer to handle errant judges; suggests overhaul in appointment and removal of judges.
New Delhi: It is apparent that Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra has lost the confidence of his colleagues and it’s a failure of his leadership, former union minister Arun Shourie has said.
“I don’t see the difficulty in saying — here are my five colleagues and we will distribute cases,” he said, adding that the four senior judges who held the historic press conference on 12 January were doing a “national service”.
“I do not agree with Fali Nariman that you just have to lump it. By October (when CJI Misra retires) great damage can be done to an institution,” he said.
However, he added that impeachment is not an answer to handle errant judges.
“Impeachment is a political process. Especially after the anti-defection laws, MPs will vote only on party lines,” he said Saturday.
Shourie was in conversation with ThePrint’s Editor-in-Chief Shekhar Gupta on NDTV’s ‘Walk The Talk’.
Talking about the crisis in the judiciary, Shourie suggested an overhaul of not only at the process of appointment of judges but also their removal.
He criticised the policy of transferring an errant judge from one high court to another.
“Take the example of Justice Karnan. When he was a problem in the Madras High Court, they shifted him to Calcutta. Removal, not transfer is the solution,” Shourie pointed.
Shourie also pointed out that in the recent times, public faith that justice will be served is diminishing.
“Even when The Indian Express experienced fissures with the government, Ramnath Goenka would say, there are courts that will give us justice,” he said.
“I don’t think one can say that today. That is a big change in 20 years,” Shourie added.
Shourie also talked about his 28th book, Anita Gets Bail, a critique on excesses of the courts in its judgments. In his book, among other things, Shourie writes about the grandiloquence that is often part of Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra’s judgments.
“I am sure someone will pick up a conspiracy theory and think we created the crisis to sell the book,” Shourie quipped on the timing of his book.
“Our courts are doing some good and a lot of things which are incomprehensible” and “indefensible”, he said adding that the quality of judgments is going down compared to the 1950s.
On the judge Loya case, Shorurie said there is “little analysis” by the Supreme Court in its ruling. In comparison, he said journalist Niranjan Takle had brought many documents on record after investigating the case for more than a year.
Citing the controversial disproportionate assets case against former Tamil Nadu chief minister J. Jayalalithaa, Shourie explained how the case was handled differently by judges at every stage.
“The trial court judge D’cunha writes a fluid judgment. He caught every fact, every little trick of the lawyers.”
But when Jayalalithaa sought an appeal in the high court, Justice C.R. Kumaraswamy “manufactures figures, forgets and eliminates figures. Again, the Supreme Court restores D’cunha’s judgement”, Shourie said.
He attributed the deterioration in quality of judgments to “general deterioration of quality of people in public life”.
He regretted that nowadays such politicians “decide tenure of civil servants, determine what investigative authorities will do or who should be judges”.
He said even good judges can’t make any difference if “investigative agencies do not bring evidence”, Shourie said.
However, he said that the responsibility is not only of the political class but the judges also.
“In the Sohrabuddin Sheikh trial, witness after witness is turning hostile. Our penal code has some strong laws on perjury but it is so rarely used in India in spite of Supreme Court judgments and reports of the Law Commission,” he said.