Crucial week for the judiciary

If the Gujarat poll is expected to mark a watershed in the nation’s politics, the one week that is left of Chief Justice of India Gopal...

If the Gujarat poll is expected to mark a watershed in the nation’s politics, the one week that is left of Chief Justice of India Gopal Ballav Pattanaik’s tenure is of no less significance to the judiciary across the country. And that’s saying a lot for a judge who has held the top post for barely a month. Pattanaik has acquired an importance that few of his predecessors with much longer tenures attained. He seems to exemplify the phrase circumstances maketh a man. When he assumed the chief justice’s office on November 9, the normally staid judicial circles were embroiled in a variety of scandals. Three judges of the Punjab and Haryana high court were indicted by their own chief justice in the job-for-cash Punjab Public Service Commission scam. A judge of the Rajasthan high court was alleged to have asked a lady doctor to have sex with him in exchange for a judicial favour. Three judges of the Karnataka high court were alleged to have been involved in a sex romp with lady lawyers at a resort in Mysore.

This is of course not the first time that venerable members of the higher judiciary have been accused of conduct unbecoming of a judge. But never were the allegations this serious and never did they come together from different states as they did around the time Pattanaik ascended to the chief justice’s office.

And, to his credit, he responded to the crisis in an equally unprecedented manner. He appointed three committees consisting mainly of high court chief justices to probe each of the scandals. There was already a legal basis for it in a 1995 Supreme Court judgement which prescribed an in-house procedure of inquiry to give teeth to the notion of judicial accountability. Pattanaik’s radical decision of appointing those committees stirred up the legal community in rather unexpected ways.

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A section of the bar in Bangalore physically attacked journalists for their candid reportage of the sex scam. One law firm filed a contempt petition and persuaded the Karnataka high court to issue notices to over 50 journalists.

Mercifully, not all lawyers are backing the judges under inquiry. The bar association of the Assam high court reacted sharply to a revelation made in the press by Pattanaik’s predecessor, Justice B.N. Kirpal, that he had recommended the transfer of one of the tainted judges from Chandigarh to Guwahati.

What added fuel to the fire was a subsequent report that Pattanaik recommended the transfer to Guwahati of a tainted judge from Bangalore as well. The bar association held demonstrations against the Assam high court being reduced to a dumping ground for all manner of undesirable judges.

This in turn inspired the Jammu and Kashmir high court bar association to stage a similar protest against Pattanaik’s reported decision to transfer another tainted judge from Karnataka to that high court.

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Clearly, Pattanaik has set off a process of accountability over which nobody seems to have any control. The revolt in the bar has thwarted the move to transfer tainted judges — even if it was meant to be only an interim measure pending the committee’s inquiry.

The age-old device of transferring any judge under a cloud does not seem to be acceptable any more. The bar has upped the ante. Pattanaik and his successors cannot anymore put off the implementation of accountability guidelines said to have been adopted by the judiciary in 1999. If the committees appointed by him confirm the serious charges being aired, the only option available to Pattanaik or his successor is to ask the judges concerned to resign.

If any of those judges refuses to resign, then the Chief Justice of India should make the whole issue public and direct the chief justice of the high court concerned to withdraw all work from that judge.

The committee dealing with the Punjab scandal has already submitted its report to Pattanaik. Its report is actually on an inquiry conducted earlier in the year by the then chief justice of the Punjab and Haryana high court, Justice A.B. Saharya. The probe made by Saharya is significantly the first reported instance of the in-house procedure of inquiry put into action. And it was done at the instance of Kirpal. Yet, when Saharya submitted his findings in August indicting three high court judges, Kirpal failed to take the inquiry ordered by him to its logical conclusion. He did nothing of the kind that was expected of him under the 1999 guidelines. Kirpal evidently found Saharya’s report good enough to act only against one of the three indicted judges, Justice Amarbir Singh Gill.

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And the only penalty he recommended against Amarbir Singh Gill was his transfer to Guwahati and even that was subsequently put on hold due to the opposition from the bar in the Northeast. It was thus creditable on Pattanaik’s part to have considered the Punjab issue afresh once he took over.

Since the turmoil over judicial accountability intensified during his brief tenure, whatever Pattanaik does with the Punjab judges in the little time he has will set the tone for the system — for better or for worse.

Write to manojmittaexpressindia.com