A matter of faith in judiciary

Published August 4, 2015
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

SOME of the people’s faith in judiciary in democracies like India is real and spontaneous for a clutch of valid reasons. Another part of the apparent faith is put on, faked, because there is no other way. There is no dearth of examples of forced belief in the law being extracted from a sceptical people. A classic cult movie illustrated it memorably. When the protagonist is accused falsely of theft by the village zamindar in the 1960s movie Ganga Jamuna, he pleads guilty. He confesses to a crime he didn’t commit. And he adds to good effect that the zamindar and the judiciary were like God to him, that he was guilty and ready to face the punishment, which was otherwise not his due. When he comes out of prison after a few months, Ganga becomes a dacoit.

Not everyone at the wrong end of a rapacious state turns into a dacoit or an armed rebel, however. The peasants of Vidarbha in Maharashtra who once spurred the legendary Shivaji to humble the Mughal Empire prefer to commit suicide in droves under Indian democracy. There are no chest-thumping nationalist crowds to greet the steady flow of bodies, though peasant suicide deaths have reached hundreds of thousands in recent years. The perennial short-changing of people may not be dissimilar to the Mughal period or before, or to what followed with British rule, but democracy has its own sedating mechanisms to tame the wild spirit of its followers.

It was thus that the elder brother of Yakub Memon, who met the condemned man a day before his execution early on Thursday, publicly professed his faith in the Indian judiciary and in the justice of God. Intriguingly, senior members of the ruling right-wing BJP described the grief of the brother and of thousands of mourners that thronged Yakub’s funeral as potential terror threats.


In a milieu like India’s, riven with religious identities, even a well-meant inflection in a judgement can trigger trouble.


Conflating faith with the secular purposes of India’s legal system predates Ganga Jamuna and Yakub Memon’s hanging, and seems to have an older genesis, perhaps from the time when judges were quaintly addressed as “your worship”. In a socially intractable milieu like India’s, which is riven with caste and religious identities (and garnished by a pleasant constituency of non-believers), even a well-meant inflection in a judgement can trigger trouble, if often to the state’s advantage.

When a five-member bench of the Supreme Court upheld a Muslim divorcee’s claim to alimony from her former husband, the state intervened to side with a reactionary Muslim clergy it had cultivated perhaps for this and similar politically fraught occasions. The state overturned a secular verdict to comply with a communal but vote-rich demand. There was another vicarious purpose, which came into play when right-wing Hindus did one better. They simply ignored an SC bar on tinkering with the delicate status quo in Ayodhya. They went and demolished the Babri Masjid, not without the rightward-tilting state’s connivance. The Ayodhya case grinds on and no one is in any doubt about which way it is heading. It is difficult to see the judiciary at cross-purposes with the political intent of the state.

Should the judiciary show disapproval the political arm of the state has effective means to crush the questioning spirit. The current establishment has sent out at least three distinct signals in this regard. It has forcibly stopped a senior lawyer with liberal credentials from becoming a judge. It has become the first government to assign a state governor’s job, a political appointment, to a retired chief justice of the SC. From a public forum, it has told the SC chief justice to put the brakes on independent-minded — “five star” — NGOs. The right-wing state is telling the judiciary: “We decide who becomes the judge, and who doesn’t. We can reward or punish you. Keep a vigil on our quarries.”

It is not without prompting from the state that an SC judge could decree that Hindutva was not a communal ideology but an expression of nationalist zeal. As recently as last year in Gujarat, an SC judge recently involved in the Memon case was publicly holding forth on the need to teach Hindu scriptures to schoolchildren. “Had I been the dictator of India, I would have introduced Gita and Mahabharata in Class I. That is the way you learn how to live life. I am sorry if somebody says I am secular or I am not secular. But we have to get good things from everywhere.”

As I said, Indian society presents a complex skein of belief systems. In an era of religious revivalism, however, in which some judges can conflate their personal beliefs with what they consider legally or morally right, there is good news too. There are those who stand tall with their unalloyed commitment to the secular spirit of India’s existence.

Justice B. N. Srikrishna comes to mind. His upright report on the 1992-93 riots in Mumbai that led to the bomb blasts for which Yakub Memon was hanged has been ignored by the state. A sample: “Even after it became apparent that the leaders of the Shiv Sena were active in stoking the fire of communal riots, the police dragged their feet on the facile and exaggerated assumption that if such leaders were arrested the communal situation would further flare up, or to put it in the words of then chief minister, Sudhakarrao Naik, ‘Bombay would burn’; not that Bombay did not burn even otherwise.”

Justice D. P. Madon on the Bhiwandi communal violence of 1970 points the finger at the same right-wing lot. Ditto with justices Joseph Vithyathil, Jagmohan Reddy, P. Venugopal at different times in different crisis zones.

Their faith lay not in the scriptures but in upholding and defending the Indian people’s rights. For better or worse, Ganga trusted them.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, August 4th, 2015

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