The present Chief Justice, R M Lodha ‘s announcement reported in today’s newspapers that he won’t take any post—constitutional or governmental-- after retirement, is reassuring, rather heartening. More so in the background of the retired Chief Justice P. Sathasivan’s acceptance of Governor’s post and some facebook comments on some of his pre-retirement judgments including the one concerning Amit Shah. We are familiar with the controversy surrounding retired Chief Justice K G Balakrishnan, who, after retirement, became Chairman of the Human Rights Commission and stubbornly refused to heed the advice of Justice V R Krishna Iyer and late Justice J S Verma to resign from this post. Later, the Income-tax Department gave him clean chit and in one of my facebook comments I had pointed out that, to my information and understanding, entire relevant material could not be considered by the Department while giving such a chit. In between, a controversy also arose on the pre-retirement judgment of the distinguished Chief Justice S H Kapadia in the case of Vodafone which was reportedly represented, among others, by his practicing son. [ To my humble understanding, Vodafone suffers from a patent mistake of jurisdiction apart from its labored, unconvincing departure from a long, unbroken line of Privy Council and Supreme court decisions, including Constitution Bench decisions, upholding the principle of primacy of substance over form admitting no qualification in tax matters. Unfortunately, this jurisdictional aspect was not pointed out by the distinguished representatives of the Union of India either, nor a review petition was filed in this befalf. ] What is noteworthy is, Justice Lodha is also a product of the same collegium system of selection which produced his above-named predecessors. My understanding is you devise any system, the vagaries of human nature will creep in to derail, even deprave, the system, howsoever foolproof it may look. Plato had conceived an ideal system of government by the Philosopher King who will not only not require any law or institutions but will be unduly fettered by them; hence their use only for lesser governments. But the perennial predicament of existence is there is no machinery or system of producing the Philosopher King of Plato. Hence, we are doomed to go on experimenting with institutions by unending chain of trial and error.
Posted on: Sat, 27 Sep 2014 05:16:42 +0000
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