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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Justice Big Mouth- Rahul Kotiyal and Ajachi Chakrabarti

Justice Big Mouth- Rahul Kotiyal and Ajachi Chakrabarti

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published Published on Apr 1, 2013   modified Modified on Apr 1, 2013
-Tehelka


A public issue is not truly public unless Markandey Katju has passed judgement. Rahul Kotiyal and Ajachi Chakrabarti stand downwind

"Journalists" writes Markandey Katju, with little sense of irony, "comment on everything under the sun." He goes on to say that when the shoe is on the other foot, when someone comments on journalism, it is misconstrued as an attack on press freedom. That when he announces he is appointing a committee to explore whether journalists require a minimum qualification to practise, he is interested more in regulating than controlling the media. That, just like law or medicine, journalism is learnt in the field but requires certain basic principles that can only be taught in the classroom.

A lot has been written about Katju's prescriptions on media education, just as a lot is written about anything he says in public. It would be fair to say that no previous chair of the Press Council of India (PCI) has attracted the public gaze as much as he; in fact, one would be hard pressed to remember the names of previous chairs of the council. In his two years in the post, however, Katju has commented on matters germane to his charge and otherwise, and has been praised and criticised in equal measure for doing so. "I have been described variously," he writes, "as a megalomaniac, a crank, a maverick, a publicity seeker, a wild man, a loose cannon, and even a dog (by a chief minister), who ‘comments on everything under the sun'."

That last quote is from a column Katju wrote on New Year's Eve as a clarification of his views, which he insisted "are consistent, coherent, and directed to one single aim: To help my country become prosperous with its people having decent lives". His weltanschauung, such as it is, is this: (1) the Industrial Revolution can provide everybody's basic needs, but 80 percent of India's population remains poor, (2) scientific thinking is the solution to that poverty and its associated issues, (3) a vast majority of Indians "are intellectually very backward, their minds full of casteism, communalism, and superstitions", and therefore, (4) his effort is to combat regressive thought, which requires a long effort of patiently explaining the truth to that majority, so that the nation sees the light. He rejects suggestions that he chases controversy for publicity, but that he finds it impossible to remain silent when "I see my country going downhill".

Katju's outspokenness in his role as PCI chair came under heavy criticism in February when he wrote a newspaper column in which he compared the anti-Muslim pogroms of 2002 with the Kristallnacht, the 1938 attack on Jews in Germany that was characterised by the Nazis as a spontaneous reaction to the killing of a German diplomat in Paris by a Jewish youth, but was actually orchestrated by the Nazis themselves. Agreeing with Ramachandra Guha's article questioning Narendra Modi's claims of development, he had asked whether the malnourished children of Gujarat should "eat the roads, electricity and factories which Modi has created". He responded to the criticism by claiming his right to free speech and insisting that he is an independent statutory authority rather than a government official and that there's nothing in the rules that prevents him from speaking out. But BJP spokesperson and PCI member Prakash Javadekar feels it does not behove the holder of such a post to make political statements. "If he wants to enter politics, we don't have a problem," Javadekar says, "but he shouldn't say these things while holding a quasi-judicial post. It doesn't matter whether he can be legally stopped from making statements or writing articles; he cannot juggle two identities and sometimes say he is speaking as a private citizen and at another time say he is speaking as the PCI chair."

Katju's perennial speaking role in the national drama didn't come about after he took the helm of the PCI. In a 40-year legal career, he was often in the news for a number of landmark judgements and observations. But the storied law career almost never happened. In 1967, when he finished top of his class to get his LLB from Allahabad University, instead of becoming the third generation of his family to enter law - his grandfather had gone on to become chief minister of Madhya Pradesh and law minister in Nehru's cabinet, while his father was Chief Justice of the Allahabad High Court at the time - Katju chose to work as a schoolteacher in a village. "He wanted to work for the good of society as a teacher, rather than follow in his father's footsteps," says VS Singh, senior vicepresident of the Allahabad High Court Bar Association, who practised law with Katju. "Later, he felt that he could better serve society by practising law."

TP Singh, a fellow student of his and now a senior advocate in the Allahabad High Court, says he was a judge for the common man. "He would often sit down and talk to people living on the street, people who probably never knew he was Chief Justice of the High Court. He was always ready to understand the perspective of the common man." His understanding, presumably, didn't extend to the lawyers pleading before him, as he gained a reputation for being a cantankerous judge. His temper, says Indra Kumar Chaturvedi, vice-president of the UP Bar Council, wasn't unjustified, as "he would come prepared to court. If a lawyer was unable to answer his questions, he would get angry, telling them if they couldn't practise law, they might as well sell pakodas instead." But, adds Chaturvedi, he would often apologise to the lawyer later in his chambers.

As a judge of the Supreme Court, Katju was often in the headlines because of his unsheathed observations. In 2007, while denying bail to fodder scam accused Braj Bhushan Prasad, he fumed, "Everyone wants to loot this country. The only deterrent is to hang a few corrupt persons from the lamp post. The law does not permit us to do it, but otherwise we would prefer to hang the corrupt." He would later ask the lower judiciary to award the death sentence in all cases of honour killings and false encounters, again becoming the focus of the media's attention. A Supreme Court advocate recalls that journalists often came to his courtroom in the hope that he would say something that would become the next day's headlines. With the attention also came praise for his intellect, as the Katju court often took nuanced positions on issues like euthanasia and judicial restraint.

In 2005, as Chief Justice of the Madras High Court, Katju made a much lauded speech in which he held that the fundamental principle of democracy was that the people are supreme, and that all authorities - judges, legislators, ministers, bureaucrats, and so on - were servants of the people. "A Daniel come to judgement!", gushed eminent jurist Fali S Nariman, in an article praising the speech. Barely six years later, however, as a justice of the Supreme Court, Katju received a letter from the Chief Information Commissioner asking him to reply to an RTI application. He wrote back insisting that he was a judge, not a clerk, that anyone seeking information should get an appointment from his secretary. He also asked for the RTI act to be reviewed. Such were the contradictions of Markandey Katju the judge: progressive judgements, such as the one that says mere membership of a banned group does not make one a terrorist or the one upholding the constitutionality of the Haj subsidy, alongside reactionary ones, such as the one that held that allowing a Muslim boy to keep a beard when school policy doesn't allow it would amount to Talibanisation of the country. Statements that insist that judges are the servants of the people alongside letters that display the hubris of power.

The contradictions persist in Katju's recent edicts. On the one hand, he criticises the media for giving space to Sachin Tendulkar's 100 centuries or Dev Anand's death, while on the other, he asks the Governor of Maharashtra to pardon Sanjay Dutt his past indiscretions. India's obsession with celebrity has been a favourite hobby horse of his; he believes India's crippling poverty means that attention to anything else is vulgar. It made him condemn this year's Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) as a tamasha, and all of Indian literature as invalid, since no writer, in his opinion, writes about the socio-economic problems of the poor.

The Markandey Katju article is a curious creature, and helps explain the man. It begins with a personal, usually incendiary, observation ("The JLF... appears to me nothing but a big tamasha"), followed by a sweeping statement ("There is hardly any worthwhile literature to be seen nowadays"). He then goes on to cite his own readings to make an academic point, which often has no more than a tenuous link to the subject at hand (there being two schools of art: art for art's sake and art for social purpose) before coming to his absolutist prescriptions ("In a poor country like India, only the theory of art for social purpose is acceptable") and, a particular favourite of his, reductio ad absurdum, to convince any skeptics that may remain ("In Jaipur, there was a discussion on Kamasutra and sex, as if this is a pressing problem in India today"). Sometimes, the last part is enough, such as his article ‘Ten ways of being foolish', released a week after his assertion that 90 percent of Indians are fools: the first eight are examples, one paragraph each, of how Indians are superstitious, followed by two hurried points about communalism and feudalism still existing. At no point is there any examination of the causes of these social ills, or what specifically can be done to get rid of them.

That is, perhaps, the tragedy of India's schoolteacher-turned-Chief-Justice- turned-Chief-Schoolteacher. The title of Katju's blog, Satyam Bruyat, is part of his amendment to a Sanskrit verse, where he says one must also tell the truth that hurts. But in the telling of that truth - which is more often than not a valid one - he ends up condensing it into a pithy, headline-grabbing controversial sentence, which he then must spend his energies to defend. And the publicity-shunning speaker of truth gives way to the grumpy old man in the spotlight once again.

Tehelka, Issue 14 Volume 10, 6 April, 2013, http://tehelka.com/justice-big-mouth/


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