Judicial activism may better describe the committed judges of Indira Gandhi's time who were taking up a public posture and seeking to convey a message. A throwback to those times occurred when a group of Congress leaders complained to the Speaker of the Lok Sabha that the new role of the judges had upset the balance that the Constitution had sought to create between the legislature and the judiciary, whereby they had their own separate spaces and did not undermine one another. Thankfully, the Congressmen's demand for a special session of Parliament to take stock of the subjugation of the legislature by the judiciary has not found much support from the Speaker. A good number of the aggrieved politicians have doubtful antecedents and will naturally run for cover under the concept of separation of powers when their main fear is that nobody, absolutely nobody, is above the law. What is more, these politicians would have been the first to applaud Mrs Gandhi's type of judicial activism had they been there, as some of them indeed were.
The present activism is not premeditated because it did not set out with an agenda or a comprehensive action plan. It happened almost by accident, entirely without any prompting, as spontaneously as ordinary citizens react to daily events. The judges, being a part of society, must have shared the common feeling that the country's rulers, be they politicians or officials, are letting it down. Not only does bad governance abound, it is riddled with a degree of corruption hitherto unknown in this land which is no stranger to corruption. Their exasperation with the system and little initial actions like taking note of someone sending in a mere postcard to undertrials being incarcerated for years, not just without trial but even any framing of charges, spouted another phenomenon
