Talk of the new normal. The phrase is meant to ironically denote how something negative has become commonplace. Who would have imagined a daily slugfest between the judiciary and the executive would join that list! The government was always a favourite target of cathartic expressions of anger. Yet all through, the top court remained a revered institution, the last resort of the wronged Indian.
But the lordships have lost much of the high estimation they once inspired. Now, the judiciary is more of an apt mirror of the society we live in, argumentative and not necessarily judicious. The exchange between the two-member Bench of Justices A K Goel and U U Lalit, and the attorney general appeared more like a tired WWE slugfest, with the latter accusing the judiciary of trespassing onto the legislature’s domain: lawmaking.
The apex court seemed in no mood to look beyond the case at hand, where the petitioner is pleading innocence in a case registered against him under the existing SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, and other such complaints. It rejected the A-G’s argument that the Act is a political-legal intervention to correct a centuries-old wrong, to lessen incidents of atrocities against historically oppressed people through stricter deterrent provisions.
Deploying a blanket logic, by nature immune to further nuance, the two-judge Bench argued it was neither against the registering of a crime or arrest, but was merely seeking to put a filter against the misuse of provisions of automatic arrest. In other words, if the Act was conceived and legislated as a safeguard by the state—an extraordinary provision meant to enable an extraordinarily disadvantaged group to ameliorate its conditions—that safeguard is being removed.
It is being brought on a par with other laws against crime. It was surprising that the court seemed determined not to hear the government’s plea, which came late but did come. Now, unless the Centre decides to overrule the court through a parliamentary enactment, there seems little hope of the law remaining in the 1989 form.
