Dear reader,
The court vacations have begun with a lot to chew on as former CJI D.Y. Chandrachud is back in discussion, not only for his new book but for a fascinating interview five days ago where, responding to criticism of the Supreme Court’s 2020 Ayodhya verdict, he noted that the very erection of the Babri Mosque (mind you, built in the 1520s) was the fundamental act of “desecration”. Historians such as Audrey Truschke are vehemently opposed, and jurists have noted that this interview has possibly opened the door for a curative petition to revisit the Ayodhya verdict.
But the broader question remains: what kind of intuition, what kind of a moral compass must lead judges? What does it say when a severely contested imagination of history is presented as the fundamental justification of a violent moment in the country’s history, by a judge who decided the fate of that conflict?
From our archives, it is a great time to revisit this essay by our co-founder Indira Jaising who characterised the former chief justice in one defining phrase: “the new right, liberal.”
“At the very top, where there is no higher authority to which one is answerable, one is only guided by one's moral compass. For a Chief Justice of India, the compass must always point towards the Constitution of India. Power without constitutional morality tracing itself to the sovereignty of the people is unhinged, unaccountable power,” Jaising writes.
This is a story that also has much to do with the waning separations of power between the executive and judiciary. And few phenomena have been as defining of this issue, as the issues in our judicial appointment process. In the latest set of judicial appointments to the Allahabad HC, for instance, two candidates recommended by the Collegium were strangely overlooked. One of them was the sole Muslim candidate.
“With their names not being cleared by the government, their seniority, if appointed in the future, has been severely compromised, which the Collegium did not desire,” our in-depth report on this is a must read.
In his interview last week, Justice Chandrachud laid much focus on his deep belief in the Hindu faith, building up his way to perhaps explain that the supposed “desecration” of a temple five hundred years ago must be avenged. But what about ‘desecrations’ happening today, through regular neoliberal urban planning, enabled by the law, of places of worship of the working class? Do religious spaces of the elite matter more than those of the urban poor?
Lawyer, researcher and trade union activist Sagrika Rajora writes in her long essay,
“The “state of exception” that Chatterji traces in refugee management has, in the neoliberal-Hindutva city, been repurposed to manage the poor through demolitions and relocations, all justified through legal loopholes, selective enforcement, and moralised claims about urban order. In this way, citizenship for the working class in India remains conditional, dependent on elite visions of who belongs in the city, and on what terms.”
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Warmly,
Sushovan Patnaik,
Associate Editor, The Leaflet