Courts rule

by Manish Anand

It's now a fact of the matter that the judiciary in Delhi has stepped into the shoes of the executive. This threatens to unsettle the fine balance between the three wings of the Indian democracy, namely the judiciary, the legislature and the executive. More unsettling is the pattern of an undemocratic power centre being created to rule the people in contravention of the spirit of the Indian constitution.

Be it catching monkeys or building a modern abattoir or disciplining the errant motorists or shutting down commercial premises termed illegal as per a Master Plan, which the experts called outdated, or resolving stand off between the MCD and the Delhi police or parking mess or the river Yamuna refusing to be restored to its epic grandeur; the courts are there to whip the executive, calling their representatives to explain the nitty-gritty of their functioning.

Last week the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh spoke out the undesirable tension between the government and the judiciary with some other elected representatives pitching in with similar opinions. The former Chief Justice of India J S Verma also spoke out against the judiciary breaching its limits and stepping into the domain of the executives. More experts from the judicial fraternity are coming out in the open against the over heating judicial activism and are calling for a balancing act.

In a democracy, it would be prudent for the people to whip around the governments for their failings through various methods, which could long way to strengthen the democracy and empower the people in the end. A short-cut approach of the judiciary calling shots all the time would only belittle its prestige in the end with less and less their orders getting implemented in the true letter and spirit.

A fine dialogue is needed at genuine fora to decide what the limits are for the judiciary as it's already burdened with its real work. Judiciary is to ensure that there is rule of law in the society and the nation is run as per the constitutional provisions. There are far more work pending for the judiciary to look into then to step unnecessarily into the territory of the executives.

Despite the Supreme Court monitoring the construction of a modern abattoir in the capital, there is hardly any forward movement in the project. The monkeys in the capital remain a menace and the animal activists are not at all wrong when they say that the monkeys too have all the right to stay in the ridge area of the capital and it's rather humans who have disturbed them. The sealing and demolition drives are least likely to solve Delhi's problems in any ways.

Let the heat between the judiciary and the government cool off at the earliest to help out the fragile Indian democracy.