Supreme Court judgments come in all shapes and sizes. Some are terse and to the point. Others can revel in the captive audience that come with giving an important verdict, turning into a writing exercise as much as a legal one. The main order in the Sasikala illegal wealth case, in which the court found the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam general secretary guilty, falls into the first camp. It is straightforward, recording arguments and summarily disposing of them over 563 pages. The supplement, by Justice Amitava Roy, is not.
When the court communicated the fact that there would be two orders delivered in the case, there was much speculation that the verdict would be split. Instead, Justice Roy co-signs the main verdict in the case, and has instead added a supplement which allows him to comment at large about what the verdict means for the country.
“A few disquieting thoughts that have lingered and languished in distressed silence in mentation demand expression at the parting with a pulpit touch,” Justice Roy writes, explaining why he needed to add on to the verdict. “Hence, this supplement.”
This short, seven-page supplement is a glorious explosion of adjectives and alliteration that might almost put Justice Dipak Misra to shame. Over the course of it, Justice Roy calls out how deeply corruption permeates our society and why it is truly dangerous. He ends the supplement calling for every citizen to be a partner in the mission to “free the civil order” from the “sprawling evil” that is corruption.
The supplement is worth reading in full, but here are some choice excerpts:
- “A growing impression in contemporary existence seems to acknowledge, the all pervading pestilent presence of corruption almost in every walk of life, as if to rest reconciled to the octopoid stranglehold of this malaise with helpless awe.”
- “The common day experiences indeed do introduce one with unfailing regularity, the variegated cancerous concoctions of corruption with fearless impunity gnawing into the frame and fabric of the nation’s essential.”
- “Emboldened by the lucrative yields of such malignant materialism, the perpetrators of this malady have tightened their noose on the societal psyche. Individual and collective pursuits with curative interventions at all levels are thus indispensable to deliver the civil order from the asphyxiating snare of this escalating venality.”
- “Innovative nuances of evidential inadequacies, processual infirmities and interpretational subtleties, artfully advanced in defence, otherwise intangible and inconsequential, ought to be conscientiously cast aside with moral maturity and singular sensitivity to uphold the statutory sanctity, lest the coveted cause of justice is a causality.”
- “This pernicious menace stemming from moral debasement of the culpables, apart from destroying the sinews of the nation’s structural and moral set-up, forges an unfair advantage of the dishonest over the principled, widening as well the divide between the haves and have nots.”
- “Such is the militant dominance of this sprawling evil, that majority of the sensible, rational and discreet constituents of the society imbued with moral values and groomed with disciplinal ethos find themselves in minority, besides estranged and resigned by practical compulsions and are left dejected and disillusioned.”
