Your honour
May I, as an ordinary citizen of India, request you to enlighten me as to whether some of the recent judgments of the Supreme Court over which you preside, have emanated from schizophrenia, amnesia or megalomania ?
To quote a few instances – in a judgment delivered by you as Supreme Court judge on November 30, 2016, you made it compulsory to stand while the national anthem played in movie halls – although you subsequently exempted disabled people (like me, an octogenarian suffering from arthritis) from the compulsory obligation. Thank you for that kind consideration. But then, on October 23, 2017, a Supreme Court bench comprising you and Justices A.M. Khanwilkar and D.Y. Chandrachud in a statement said: “People do not need to stand up in the cinema halls to prove their patriotism,” while observing that it cannot be assumed that if a person does not stand up for national anthem, then he is “less patriotic.” May I request you, the honourable Chief Justice, to explain how you reconcile your previous judgment with the latest one ? In the absence of any rational explanation for such inconsistencies, psychologists attribute them to mental disorders like schizophrenia (split personality syndrome) or amnesia (forgetfulness).
May I also request you to explain your utterances (sorry to say, unbecoming of a judge of your stature !) during the hearing of a case on November 10, 2017 ? It was related to allegations about bribes that were taken in the name of some Supreme Court
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judges to secure settlement in favour of those accused in a scam. Your colleague in the Supreme Court, Justice J. Chelameswar, had earlier ordered the transfer of the case to a Constitutional Bench of the apex court. But another five-judge bench presided over by you, junked his order.
Since your name also, was reported to have figured in the allegations, shouldn’t you have the sense of judicial impartiality to recuse yourself from hearing the case – as many judges with a sense of self-respect had done in the past ? On the contrary, you dismissed senior counsel Prashant Bhushan’s argument by claiming that you, as the Chief Justice of India, were the “master and the last word” on setting up apex courts to look into cases. Do such an utterance suit a person of your position ? Isn’t this a textbook example of megalomania ? I may remind you in this connection, of what one of your predecessors, former Chief Justice A.S. Anand, said about judges: “Our function is divine; the problem begins when we start thinking that we have become divine” ?
As Indian judges are often inclined to threaten critics with the catch-all charge of `contempt of court,’ I know that I may also be hauled up under that charge. You, as the “master and the last word,” can surely haul me up – and impose upon me a fine (which I cannot afford to pay), or in lieu of that, sentence me to imprisonment in jail (with which I am quite familiar, having been a political prisoner during the 1975 Emergency), or even sentence me to death by hanging (which I prefer, since I do not want to live under an arbitrary and dictatorial judiciary).
Sumanta Banerjee is a political commentator and writer, is the author of In The Wake of Naxalbari’ (1980 and 2008); The Parlour and the Streets: Elite and Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Calcutta (1989) and ‘Memoirs of Roads: Calcutta from Colonial Urbanization to Global Modernization.’ (2016). He is based in Hyderabad.