This refers to the report "Judges appointment row: Govt firefights Subramaniam issue" (July 3). The controversy created over the appointment of Gopal Subramaniam as a Supreme Court judge is unnecessary. With the Bharatiya Janata Party government not revealing the precise reasons for segregating the name of the said jurist (from the list of four names recommend to it by the Supreme Court collegium), the public is not in a position to appreciate the rationale behind the decision.
Be that as it may, the Congress decrying the said controversy "as an attempt at undermining India's judiciary" is amusing, to say the least. The very concept of committed judiciary was evolved by the Congress, from the days of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Gandhi had a grouse against the judiciary that it was obstructing the implementation of her populist, socialist policies such as the abolition of privy purses to the erstwhile Maharajas and the Bank Nationalisation Act. She, therefore, superseded three independent, senior judges of the Supreme Court in April 1973 and appointed the pliable A N Ray as the Chief Justice of India (CJI). Her crowning glory in the confrontation with the judiciary was in January 1977 (at the height of the Emergency) when she superseded the eminent judge H R Khanna and appointed M H Beg as CJI, all because Khanna was the lone dissenting judge in the infamous Habeas Corpus case. Delivering his judgment in the case, Khanna struck down the Preventive Detention Act (which enabled the government to arbitrarily detain, without trial, scores of Opposition leaders) as unconstitutional, calling it an "anathema" and declared that "the state cannot deprive a person of his life or personal liberty without the due process and the authority of law". This when the remaining four judges upheld the Act, holding that during Emergency, even a citizen's fundamental right to life stood abrogated. For delivering his landmark judgment, Khanna was superseded and he promptly resigned from the Supreme Court.
V Jayaraman Chennai
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