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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Can’t digest what we heard in RS, says SC judge in farewell speech by Krishnadas Rajagopal

Can’t digest what we heard in RS, says SC judge in farewell speech by Krishnadas Rajagopal

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published Published on Aug 20, 2011   modified Modified on Aug 20, 2011

-The Indian Express

 

A day after Rajya Sabha members cutting across party lines attacked the higher judiciary’s collegium system of appointment, an indignant Supreme Court found its voice in the farewell speech of a retiring Justice.

Justice VS Sirpurkar, whom Chief Justice of India SH Kapadia referred to as a “jolly good fellow” in his address, said the sight on TV was “not at all digestible”.

“The country is at crossroads. It was not at all a pleasant experience to watch what happened on TV yesterday. It was not at all digestible,” Justice Sirpurkar said at the very outset of his speech to a gathering of fellow SC judges and senior lawyers at a farewell function organised by the Supreme Court Bar Association on the court’s lawns on Friday evening.

Speaking on the impeachment motion against Calcutta High Court judge Soumitra Sen, member after member in the Rajya Sabha had sought a second look at the closed-door collegium system of judicial appointments, and urged an alternative “to get honest judges”.

Justice Sen was impeached by an overwhelming majority in the Rajya Sabha after a four-hour debate on charges of misappropriation of money and making false statements and misrepresenting facts of that misappropriation.

Reliable sources in the Supreme Court said Justice Sirpurkar’s statement was an expression of a collective indignation felt by judges about the manner in which the legislature had tarred all judges with the same brush.

Justice Sirpurkar’s words, they said, were an “expression of the realisation that everything was not all right”, and that lawmakers, in “denigerating a judge, were denigerating the judiciary as a whole”.

Justice Sirpurkar’s criticism is significant because it was he who had, as Chief Justice of Calcutta High Court in 2006, sent a report to the then Chief Justice of India, YK Sabharwal, against Justice Soumitra Sen’s conduct.

CJI Kapadia acknowledged this fact with a special mention in his address: “What you read in the newspaper... He is behind this. I do not want to say anything more.”

Opening the impeachment debate, Leader of the Opposition Arun Jaitley had said that “the best in this country are not willing to become judges”.

“We have to seriously consider why... we should seriously consider a system which is being debated about setting up a National Judicial Commission... Public interest has to be protected in the matter of appointment of competent judges, in the matter of appointment of judges who are men of integrity, men of scholarship. Is it today the discretion of the collegium? Collegium is also a system of sharing the spoils. When the high courts recommend, members of the collegium share the spoils,” Jaitley said.

The RJD’s Rajneeti Prasad was even more blunt: “For a chapraasi we need interviews, we now need a judicial commission to get honest judges.”

Justice Sirpurkar followed up his remarks on what happened in the Upper House with a word of advice for his fellow judges, who occupied the entire front row, while the CJI and Attorney General of India GE Vahanvati sat on the dais.

“Judiciary has to be saved. Love your judiciary. We have to treat judiciary like our mother... as mother judiciary... Then the pettiness of your mind will leave and the judge will not shirk from his duty,” Justice Sirpurkar said as the parting shot at the end of his 43 years in the”profession”.

The Indian Express, 20 August, 2011, http://www.indianexpress.com/news/cant-digest-what-we-heard-in-rs-says-sc-judge-in-farewell-speech/834569/


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