The Big Story: Judgment calls

Speaking at the Delhi High Court's 50th anniversary celebrations, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had a few choice suggestions on how to make the judiciary work better. On the pressing problem of the enormous backlog of cases awaiting resolution, he admitted that government was one of the biggest litigants. On the fraught question of judicial vacancies and appointments, he suggested that the time had come for an All India Judicial Service, which would ensure the inclusion of Dalits and other disadvantaged sections, among its many other merits. The proposal flows from many months of standoff between the government and the judiciary.

The two organs of state have long been locked in a dispute over how to appoint judges, with the government trying to push through a National Judicial Appointments Commission and the judiciary trying to preserve the collegium that currently decides on appointments. The confrontation escalated until the government passed a constitutional amendment in August 2014 creating the NJAC and the Supreme Court struck down the amendment in October 2015, saying it violated the "basic structure" of the Constitution.

Meanwhile, judicial pendency remained a harrowing problem, made worse by vacancies which could not be filled because ministers and judges could not agree on how to make appointments. While the Centre failed to clear appointments, it also moved slowly on legislation to increase judicial capacity. Earlier this year, Chief Justice of India TS Thakur broke down in public as he spoke of the workload on the judiciary and the executive's refusal to increase the number of judges.

Could the All India Judicial Service be the happy mean that both government and the courts agree on? Filling the benches through examinations conducted by the Union Public Service Commission, some have argued, could ensure transparency, staving off both political interference and nepotism within the judicial set up. It could also help change the ossified structures and processes of the judiciary. The proposal to form this judicial cadre goes back 50 years and the Modi government has been pushing it at the district level for some time now. But can an examination decide on an individual's ability to be a judge?

The Big Scroll: Scroll.in on the day's big story

Abhishek Sudhir on the need to reform the process of judicial appointments.

Gautam Bhatia on the Supreme Court verdict which struck down the Constitutional amendment creating the National Judicial Appointments Commission.

Political pickings

  1. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal has said judges fear their phones being tapped, though the Centre denies the charge.
  2. The Jammu and Kashmir High Court has come down heavily on state authorities for failing to protect schools, 27 of which have been torched in the last few weeks.
  3. After the Congress demanded an investigation on the killing of eight prisoners who escaped from the Bhopal Central Jail on Monday, the Bharatiya Janata Party accused it of votebank politics.

Punditry

  1. In the Indian Express, Khaled Ahmed asks whether the Nawaz Sharif government will go the same way as many elected governments in Pakistan, toppled before their term was over.
  2. In the Hindu, Shashank Joshi on the implications of India's growing arms footprint in Afghanistan.
  3. In the Telegraph, Malavika Karlekar on an awkward situation in Kashmir.

Giggles

Don't miss...

An exceprt from Preeti Gill's book on how the massacre of Sikhs on December 31, 1984, created a new minority community:

However, the one thing that is clear is that a very visible, very dominant community of prosperous farmers, landlords, shopkeepers, businessmen, soldiers and policemen was transformed into a minority overnight through concentrated violence and brutality. The realisation of their minority status was brought home to the Sikhs in many ways, including being told repeatedly that they formed a miniscule two percent of the country’s population and as such were entitled to just that much by way of jobs and quotas.

Personally for me this minority status revealed itself in strange ways and there are two instances that I wish to cite here. We left Delhi in 1985 for a two-year stint in Nagpur where my husband’s company had posted him. On our return to Delhi in May 1987, we stayed with my sister while we searched for a flat to rent. That proved to be an impossible task.