 "R M Lodha")
The Supreme Court hall where Rajendra Mal Lodha was the presiding judge till last week seemed too small because the cases he handled always seemed to attract swarms of lawyers and journalists. Now that he has taken over as the 41st Chief Justice of India, he has a larger courtroom - but the complaints remain. This time it is about the sound system that was kept switched off for decades preventing everyone there from listening to the proceedings.
Justice Lodha, 64, has that effect on people. They want to hang on to his words. You could say he has played a large role in making the domed edifice of the Supreme Court a staple on national television. As he himself told the media after assuming office on Sunday, "Earlier, the judiciary was not visible, now it is visible."
It was Justice Lodha's bench that made it mandatory for all the states, Union territories and regulatory bodies to put in place a legal mechanism to implement the Vishaka guidelines making it incumbent on employers to ensure prevention of sexual harassment in the workplace. And when the allegations reached the highest court itself, it was Justice Lodha who headed the panel to inquire into a legal intern's charges against a retired judge of the court.
He has decided numerous high-profile cases, including the rejection of then Army chief V K Singh's claim that he was born a year later than the date that his entry certificate showed. He also presided over the bench that took up the case of acid attacks on women and banned over-the-counter sale of any acid while awarding Rs 3 lakh to the victim.
His innovation in handling the so-called Coalgate scam is a model for how cases regarding natural resources should be dealt with. Avoiding the bloodbath that followed the cancellation of 122 telecom licences, he did not cancel the coal block licences. What he did was to raise the Damocles' sword over the heads of ministers and top bureaucrats. It was they who scampered around doing on their own what the court could have done - cancelling the block allocations. Justice Lodha was also subtle where others would have been heavy-handed. When the Central Bureau of Investigation, or CBI, hemmed and hawed on the scam, he shamed it by calling it a "caged parrot". That alone was enough to goad the agency into action. It even reported to the Supreme Court how a minister had vetted its probe report, leading to the resignation of Ashwini Kumar, the law minister.
It is not by mere words, sweetened with humour and smiles, that he granted more elbow room for CBI, whose one big handicap is the rule requiring the sanction of higher authorities to prosecute any bureaucrat of corruption and other offences. He gave the agency the backing of judicial power. In one of his judgments, he decreed that such sanction was not necessary when the court was monitoring a CBI probe. He mandated in another judgment that the court had to complete the corruption trials of MPs and MLAs within a year.
The country could have benefited from Justice Lodha's activist ways, but he will be in charge of the judicial administration for a mere five months, with two of those likely to be largely unproductive due to summer vacation. Making the most of the time he has, as soon as he took over, he issued a rule restricting hearing adjournments, the bane of court proceedings in the country. He has also promised to appoint more judges soon to clear the 33 million cases pending in the country's courts.
The man from Rajasthan is perched at the top of the judicial pyramid at a time when the results of a tricky Lok Sabha poll could throw up many constitutional conundrums. It is perhaps just as well that the Supreme Court is presided over by an activist judge.
