I am not sure if there is any English equivalent to this, but in my mother tongue, Malayalam, there is a saying which, when translated, should read something like: “To kill the rat burn down the house”. And there is one more: “When you lose at the market place take it out on your mother”. Last week’s political developments reminded me of these maxims.
Much of the impact will, of course, be lost in translation but the general drift is to say, in the first instance, that disaster is sure to follow those who act without gauging the consequences of their actions and, in the second, it is senseless to attack the defenceless instead of showing courage to face the strong.
The Congress Party, with Rahul Gandhi as its president, is turning out to be one that is ready to burn the house, or India as a whole, in its attempt to kill the rat or is attacking the mother for losing a battle elsewhere. The rat and the mother, in the present case, are represented by the judiciary in general and the Chief Justice of India in particular. The market place adversary, of course, is Prime Minister Narendra Modi who is proving to be too strong for Gandhi or anyone else in the present scenario.
Mercifully, Vice-President and Rajya Sabha Chairman Venkaiah Naidu, after consulting a host of legal luminaries, put an end to the charade without much ado by stopping the Congress at the gates. Regardless, the Congress Party has added one more dishonourable feather to its cap. The party that promulgated Emergency for the first and only time (1975-1977) has now become the first party - there are six others in the group but they count for next to nothing - to officially charge the highest judicial officer in the country with ‘misbehaviour’ and seek his impeachment. If the stigma of Emergency is still haunting the party, here’s one more that will give it sleepless nights for a long time to come.
The Congress has questioned Naidu’s dismissal of its petition saying he had gone above and beyond his vested powers. The party says the Chairman is only a conduit and, therefore, is duty-bound to constitute a committee of jurors which will go into the merits of the motion and recommend or reject further action.
However, the 1968 Judges (Inquiry) Act is clear on what the presiding officer of the house - Rajya Sabha or the Lok Sabha - can do. It says: “In the case of a notice given in the Council of States i.e. Rajya Sabha, by not less than fifty members, then the Speaker or, as the case may be, the Chairman may, after consulting such persons, if any, as he thinks fit and after considering such materials, if any, as may be available to him, either admit the motion or refuse to admit the same.”
Eminent jurist Fali Nariman described the Congress move to impeach the CJI as “horrible” and congratulated Naidu for his quick decision. “The vice-president has the statutory authority and he has rightly rejected the notice,” said Nariman. His colleague Soli Sorabjee, former Solicitor-General known for his impartial comments, also criticised the Congress decision to drag the office of the CJI into the political mudslinging.
Ever since Modi became prime minister in May 2014, the Congress has been tirelessly campaigning to run him down at every opportunity. One of the main planks on which Rahul Gandhi and his partymen had been mounting this campaign was the perceived threat from Modi to long-established democratic institutions in the country.
(During the course of the townhall at Westminster in London last week, Modi acknowledged the criticisms he had been facing in the past four years saying he had learned so much from them and that he was comfortable as long as they were criticisms and not baseless allegations. He ridiculed the opposition when he told interviewer Prasoon Joshi that he got his daily ‘fix’ of energy from such inane allegations.)
Although the four pillars of democracy are supposed to be built on the same footing and, therefore, equally important in the overall concept, the judiciary must be considered the most vital because it should act as the final frontier beyond which there is anarchy.
Parliament is made up of politicians who, sooner or later, are bound to be at loggerheads. The executive, or the bureaucracy, is mostly faceless and can thus implement decisions in any particular way or even ignore/delay them altogether if it so desired. The media, like the politicians, is also divided and can take sides without serving the original purpose for which it was established. Fake news and slanted reports are more in currency than fact-based accounts and analyses.
That leaves only the judiciary which can bring coherence and compatibility to a constitutional democracy like India. If you reduce the judiciary into another of your scheming, gossip-ridden, prejudiced social clubs, you are providing a sure recipe for democracy’s disaster. Rahul Gandhi’s party was attempting to do exactly that by moving to impeach the Chief Justice of India.
Because it has found fighting Modi politically a near-impossible task, at least for the foreseeable future, the Congress Party decided to malign him by attacking CJI Dipak Mishra who, it charges, has surrendered the independence of the judiciary to the prime minister. The immediate provocation for the Congress to submit the motion to impeach was the ruling last week by the Supreme Court bench headed by Justice Mishra that there was no need to inquire into the death due to heart attack of CBI Special Judge Brijmohan Loya in December of 2014.
At the time of his death Loya was hearing a case of alleged fake encounter by the Gujarat police in which Sohrabuddin Sheikh, who was facing charges of illegal possession of assault rifles, was killed in November of 2005 while travelling on a bus. Amit Shah, who was then a minister under Modi’s chief ministership of Gujarat and is currently president of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), was one of the accused.
While medical reports and brother judges who were with Loya at the time of his death certified the death as natural, rumours began spreading that he was poisoned and murdered because he was about to convict Shah. A group of lawyers had gone to court seeking an inquiry into Loya’s death and the Congress Party, seeing another chance to pull down Modi and Shah, had merrily joined the bandwagon.
The Congress says the Loya case verdict had nothing to do with its decision to seek impeachment of Justice Mishra. It is true that though the petition was submitted to Naidu the day after the Loya case verdict, the party had been going around town threatening impeachment of the CJI for nearly two months. However, the question that the party would not want to face is whether it would still have gone ahead with the motion had Mishra’s court ruled in favour of an inquiry.
Senior lawyer and Congress member of the Rajya Sabha Kapil Sibal, who has been spearheading the impeachment attempt, has said the party will challenge Naidu’s ruling in the Supreme Court. The appeal will be in the form of another public interest litigation (PIL) which, as per court roster, will be heard by the bench headed by the CJI. The CJI, of course, has the authority to assign it to a larger bench even as he recuses himself. However, it is almost unthinkable that a bench of the Supreme Court will rule to pave way for impeachment of its own chief.
Congress Party is staring at near-certain defeat but is planning to press ahead. So, here’s another proverb, this time in Sanskrit, to end this column: “Vinaasha kaale vipareetha buddhi”. In bad times you will only have destructive thoughts.
Delhi Diary
