So is it the size of Sikkim (just six lakh residents, only a tenth of which live in cities) or the distance from the seat of power (the distance from New Delhi to Gangtok is 1,598 km) that makes it so irrelevant? How else can you explain the judicial system posting Justice P Dinakaran to the Sikkim High Court as its chief justice even while a three-member committee set up by Rajya Sabha Chairman and India’s Vice President Hamid Ansari is still finalising a charge sheet against him? The lawyers in the court are so incensed with the step-motherly treatment that they have threatened to boycott his oath-taking ceremony next week. It is true that the charges against Justice Dinakaran have not been proved — the three members met at the residence of Justice V S Sirpurkar of the Supreme Court earlier in the week and decided that they needed some more time to study the bulky documents. But the charges against him are serious — illegal encroachment on government land, evasion of stamp duty, possessing agricultural land in excess of the ceiling — and if the evidence is accepted, Justice Dinakaran may face impeachment proceedings in Parliament.
How could the system be so cynical that it posted a judge as a chief justice even while he is under a cloud? Caesar’s wife has not only to be as pure as the driven snow, she has to be seen to be as pure. In such a case, surely the operating principle should have been guilty till proven innocent. In the case of Justice Soumitra Sen of the Calcutta High Court, who is also under a cloud and is facing impeachment proceedings after the Chief Justice of India wrote to the government on the matter in 2008, the saving grace is that he continues to be on leave and is not hearing any cases. And in Justice Sen’s case, a division bench of the court had cleared him of the charges. Despite this, however, the Chief Justice of India formed an internal committee and asked him to resign; when he refused, the CJI asked for impeachment proceedings to begin.
In 1993, when Justice V Ramaswami was all set to be impeached after a three-judge committee found him guilty and all 196 MPs of the Opposition parties voted in favour of this, the Congress party MPs walked out of Parliament, thereby ensuring there wasn’t a two-thirds majority in favour of impeaching him. The mood, however, has changed quite dramatically today and Law Minister Veerappa Moily has been pushing for a Judicial Standards and Accountability Bill to take care of precisely such issues of allegations of corruption against judges. If the judiciary isn’t going to mend its own house, the politicians are going to mend it for them.