Courting irrelevance

The judiciary should choose its battles carefully

The Supreme Court has chosen to uphold Chandigarh’s decision to denotify local and state highways and turn them into district roads. The city administration’s decision was obviously aimed at steering clear of the apex court’s order of December 2016 banning the sale of alcohol within 500 metres of state and national highways. In his latest order, Chief Justice J S Khehar argued that the roads being denotified were within the city limits and as such did not carry “fast moving traffic”. It is noteworthy that just six months ago, the Supreme Court had banned the sale of liquor, as well