Pratap Bhanu Mehta writes in the Express-
Chandrachud, a Chief Justice of his time
A time when Pakistan and Bangladesh's Chief Justices have had to eat humble pie. Chandrachud has very cleverly played to the gallery and leaves the Bench more secure than he found it.
His self-defence on civil liberties was: ‘I gave so many people bail, from A to Z’, rather than the ‘law and process was applied consistently and fairly. Umar Khalid got the same consideration as Arnab Goswami’
In other words, he followed the letter and the spirit of the law. Judges must base their judgments on evidence presented to the court. They must ignore the ravings of virtue signalling shitheads like Mehta. There is prima facie evidence for a UAPA case against Umar Khalid and thus no bail can be given. There is no suggestion that Goswami ever did anything that threatened the sovereignty of India. Why not say 'Obama was wrong to have Osama killed while not ordering the abduction and killing of his wife Michelle' ?
Supreme Court justices demitting office are often subject to a legal scorecard.
Anybody can subject anybody to a scorecard. The relevant scorecard for Chandrachud has to do with whether generations of judges as yet unborn quote his ratios or if there are judicial doctrines associated with his name. Mehta is too stupid and ignorant to make any prognostications in this respect. For my part, I think much will depend on whether Chandrachud writes a good textbook of constitutional law. He is certainly well qualified to do so.
Assessments go through their rulings and catalogue the good, the bad and the ugly.
Stupid ones may. Assessing a jurist requires an understanding of the science of law.
In more sophisticated assessments, the criteria is not in agreement with those doing the assessing.
Unless their assessment is based on the science of law.
Often you may disagree with a judgment but it can still be a product of sound or at least plausible legal reasoning.
The problem is that a given ratio may be used to achieve the opposite result by a subsequent Bench. The law is a double edged sword.
Justice D Y Chandrachud had a long tenure both as a judge and chief justice. In such a long career of a highly pedigreed judge, there are bound to be some judgments that rack up a positive score: At least initially, he showed considerable promise in areas of personal freedom — reproductive rights, right to privacy, gender equality.
As is laid down by the Constitution.
There are some fine economic and administrative law judgments.
No. This is where fault can be found with Chandrachud. But, these faults have accumulated over decades.
But this framework of tallying up a score-card seems entirely inappropriate for as consequential a judge as Justice Chandrachud.
One can classify judges as liberal or conservative on particular issues. This is helpful for those who need to predict the direction of Judge based law in particular respects.
Simply put, if a casting director had chosen a chief justice for the Age of Modi, she would not have found a better candidate.
What this nutter means is that Modi would have chosen Chandrachud.
This is an age that is characterised by authoritarianism and communalism.
No. It is characterised by a global war against Islamic terrorism.
Just as Prime Minister Narendra Modi brilliantly used the democratic form to institutionalise these ends,
Nehru did so. He presided over the ethnic cleansing of Muslims and the imprisonment of Sheikh Abdullah.
Justice Chandrachud followed the form of a liberal constitutionalism to achieve the same ends: Consistently legalising majoritarianism.
This happened under Nehru. I
At issue is not simply the Ayodhya judgment where the Supreme Court went even beyond the judgment of the Allahabad High Court.
What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. The Left questioned the historicity of the Temple. But there was no proof that Babur or anybody else had created a waqf for the mosque. The claim of the shebait failed by adverse possession. That of the temple deity did not. There was evidence it had received continuing regular worship.
As a one-off judgment, it could be treated as a debatable aberration. As part of a pattern, diluting the Places of Worship Act,
which may be against the basic structure of the constitution. The Bench claims an inherent right of an expansive kind. If there is no 'doctrine of political question', then no law passed by parliament may not be overturned by the Bench.
creating a legal environment where lots of speech is risky but communal hate speech is not,
unless it threatens national sovereignty- i.e. UAPA is applicable.
the delayed restoration of statehood to Kashmir,
which is purely a matter for the Centre.
created a stench of majoritarianism.
Mehta creates a stench. This is because everything he says or writes is shit.
There are orders that might be salutary, like the recent one on bulldozer justice.
Which depends on the ability of the Court to punish those involved. But this can be delegated. Mobs can do what bulldozers do. How do you identify the leaders of a mob? If the Court can't even punish a failed politician like Prashant Bhushan, fuck can they do to Yogiji?
But these are of a pattern: Coming too late after considerable damage has been done, and the signals of where the state will go are already enshrined.
Mehta ran away from Ashoka University. He realized that India is going in an Indian direction. Fuck you India!
On authoritarianism, it gets even worse.
Modi exercises authority by virtue of commanding a majority in Parliament. Democracy endorses majoritarianism. If the Bench does not like it, it will be reconstituted. Pakistan has got rid of the Collegium. In Bangladesh a stupid decision by the Bench brought down the ruling party. Students forced the Chief Justice to resign. Chandrachud helped the Indian Bench preserve its position though, no doubt, it is having to draw in its horns.
Whatever the lofty judicial pronouncements, we were not assured that habeas corpus would be protected.
Habeas corpus is protected. Those detained under UAPA are legally detained.
It did not protect dissenters’ rights,
only in the sense that it didn't protect the right of murderers to murder. What is illegal for a conformist is also illegal for a dissenter.
or did so only after the state’s processes had literally killed many of them.
The courts have never prevented extra judicial killing on an industrial scale. But nothing of the sort has occurred under Modi. There is no Khalistani insurgency. In the North East people may be killing each other. They aren't trying to kill Indian soldiers. That may change.
The arbitrary conduct of agencies continued unabated.
If things remained as they were, this was either because such was the law of the land or because no legal challenge was made or found sustainable. How is that Chandrachud's fault?
Even in possible corruption or conflict of interest cases which had high political stakes, the use of procedural cover-ups to prevent a fair reckoning was astounding. As a chief justice who exercised the discretion that comes with the power of the roster and constitution of the benches, he bears full responsibility for this corrosion.
In the eyes of a nutter. The master of the roster still has to get enough judges to agree with him if he wants a particular outcome.
It was also a Court which, in so many cases, from the Maharashtra Assembly case to Article 370, from Delhi government crisis to electoral bonds, used discretion over timing to blunt the force of its own judgment.
It would be fair to say that the Bench does not want a confrontation with Parliament lest it lose he Collegium and 'inherent right' etc. Sooner or later, India will get a 'doctrine of political question' and the administration of the Courts will be vested in an independent authority.
In effective terms, he left our liberties less secure, our institutions less strong, our faith in the Court weaker.
Mehta is speaking for himself. But he is a fucking cretin. He abandoned his students because he was pretending that a private University had been pressurized to sack him by Modi. But, in that case, why not stick to his position and take the matter to court? Still this explains why, if Mehta chops off his own head and shoves it up his rectum, he will be able to claim that Trump and Modi wanted him to do so and thus he was powerless not to comply with their wishes.
The scorecard approach in relation to Justice Chandrachud rests on a category mistake.
No. It is quite usual, more especially in America, to have scorecards for Judges and Senators and so forth. This enables better predictions and thus less uncertainty. This involves no 'category mistake'. It is a fact that people- including judges and politicians- have certain fundamental beliefs and preferences. However, one must find empirical evidence that this correlates to actual decisions.
It goes something like “X number of good judgments, Y number of dubious ones.”
A good judgment is sound law and is unlikely to be overturned. This is an empirical matter.
Justice Chandrachud was more artful than this kind of arithmetic would suggest.
Nonsense! He was a Harvard trained jurist. He understood that defective application of the science of law will cause a judgment to be overturned. After all, the Bench frequently overrules itself by way of review or curative petition.
Like the prime minister, he could throw a dollop of glossy paint on a building while letting the foundations rot with judicial termite.
Mehta can't even throw glossy paint. He just shits on everything.
In retrospect, the good judgments performed exactly that function: They keep the veneer and the form alive, to allow us to pretend that we might still get justice from the Chief Justice of India.
Sadly, in India, it is too easy to knock on the door of the Master of the Roster. It is in the interest of the Court to ensure that lower courts are approached first and that Lex Judicata is observed. Appeals should be on matters of law not fact. It is absurd that the Supreme Court keeps overruling itself.
Festive offer
He was a judge for the Age of Modi because he personified the style of this age.
His style remained the same. He got the top job because he had seniority.
This is an age that converts civil and political rights into an act of personal beneficence.
No it isn't. The President isn't actively using her power of clemency. Judges do not act in a personal capacity.
His self-defence on civil liberties was: “I gave so many people bail, from A to Z”, rather than the “law and process was applied consistently and fairly. Umar Khalid got the same consideration as Arnab Goswami.”
Khalid was charged under UAPA. Goswami wasn't. Judges have to go by the law. I suppose you may say 'Judges can strike down UAPA as unconstitutional'. But the thing will be brought back by ordinance and the Collegium system would be repudiated by Parliament.
One is tempted to paraphrase the line from Macbeth: “The Justice doth protest too much.”
Ignorant cunt! The line 'the lady doth protest too much' is from Hamlet.
In some administrative areas, digitisation, live streaming, the obsession with paper-lessness, were worthy goals in their own right, all of a piece with the techno modernism of our time. But in judicial selection, we are no more confident that the court is secure with better judges.
He means 'we are no longer confident'. Why is Mehta's English so poor? He studied abroad.
Unusually for a judge, he was always in the public eye: If Modi’s Mann Ki Baat was a genial Sunday performance, the chief justice made sure, through a PR blitz, that we always got a glimpse into his heart.
That was only towards the end when he sensed that the tide was turning against the judiciary. Thus even before recent events in Bangladesh and Pakistan, he launched a charm offensive. Reminding people that the Bench had delivered on Ayodhya was sound strategy as was giving the Lord credit for his own judgment.
The PM constantly judges his own performance.
No. He highlights his achievements. Politicians are supposed to do so.
But for a judge to be a judge in his own cause reeks of injudiciousness.
Chandrachud is facing no court case. He has never been the Judge in a case involving himself. What reeks here is Mehta's stupidity.
The content, in a subtler way, was also the same.
No it wasn't. Modi claims that his achievements are those of his party and the wider Sangh Parivar. This is because for him to remain in office voters have to vote for members of his Party. If we had a Presidential system, or if Modi was a dynastic politician, things may have been different. Chandrachud, as he demits office, hopes to raise the morale and prestige of the Bench. That is laudable.
The chief justice is entitled to his faith. He can even draw strength from it for his duties to the Republic. Thinking that we will be judged by a higher power ought to make us more honest and courageous. But the regular performance of this faith in the public eye, and the kitschy bowdlerisation of Hinduism
Mehta thinks Hinduism contains obscene material and thus has to be 'bowdlerised'.
for a public performance in the eye of the camera became routine. From the “dhwaja of justice” that Somnath inspired, to the new goddess of justice, to the piece de resistance, a full camera crew performance of a private puja with the prime minister, was very much in tune with cheapening of religion in our times.
No. The thing was tastefully done. It helps that Chandrachud and his wife are slim and youthful looking. What happened to the Chief Justices of Pakistan and Bangladesh this year, did not and will not happen in India. Maybe this was inevitable but full marks to Chandrachud for clinching the matter.
But more seriously, the performance shook faith in both the independence of the judiciary and constitutional secularism.
Previously, Mehta had great faith in both. That is why he brought PILs seeking reviews of the Ayodhya judgment, Article 370, CAA, etc. What's that? Mehta did not such thing? In that case, either he had no objection to such things or else he was utterly useless in which case his 'faith' or lack of it was irrelevant.
The similarities go on. The prime minister on a good day can be a master of lofty sentiments. Justice Chandrachud’s sometimes brilliant disquisitions on liberty, equality and fraternity in many judgments would bring tears to the eyes of even seasoned political theorists. Yet in both cases, the disjunction between what was being professed and what was being done, either to distract or create a trail of plausible deniability, is too vast.
Mehta, by contrast, writes like shit and runs away from his students in rural Haryana.
The net effect of that scholarship, like the PM’s speeches, was not to inspire, but to create a sense of unmeaning.
Mehta is the master of meaninglessness.
India has had a terrible run of chief justices recently.
Its 'public intellectuals' are even worse
In each of those cases, you could treat the infirmity of the judge as an individual failing, confined to personal matters or a limited number of cases.
The most glaring failure of the Bench was its decision that a diplomat could void his own immunity. Still, it was because the Administration took up the matter that the Marines were returned. Still, the Indian judiciary made itself a laughing stock. The judges had wanted to detain the Marines indefinitely while it mulled setting up a new type of Court which they had long had in mind. In other words, the Bench was acting in its usual dilatory manner. Had the thing not gone to arbitration, the Marines would have grown old and died before the proposed Court was set up.
But the subtle, pervasive and systematic decimation of constitutional values he allowed, the performative example he set, and the scepticism he generated that the learned and the suave can do fearless civic duty, made Justice Chandrachud arguably a chief justice more damaging than Justice A N Ray.
Why stop there? Why not say Chandrachud was worse than Judge Jeffreys? He often came to Court drunk and ordered the hanging of any one opposed to the King. A.N Ray superseded three Judges and became Indira's rubber stamp. Chandrachud was a good judge by any standards. That is why Mehta hates him. Both got Doctorates abroad from prestigious institutions, but only on Chandrachud was that expensive education not utterly wasted.
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