Indian Judiciary Quotes

If you want to know America—if you want to see it for what it was and what it is—you need to look at Indian history and at the Indian present. If you do, if we all do, we will see that all the issues posed at the founding of the country have persisted. How do the rights of the many relate to the rights of the few? What is or should be the furthest extent of federal power? How has the relationship between the government and the individual evolved? What are the limits of the executive to execute policy, and to what extent does that matter to us as we go about our daily lives? How do we reconcile the stated ideals of America as a country given to violent acts against communities and individuals? To what degree do we privilege enterprise over people? To what extent does the judiciary shape our understanding of our place as citizens in this country? To what extent should it? What are the limits to the state’s power over the people living within its borders? To ignore the history of Indians in America is to miss how power itself works.

These important national institutions continue to suffer from the bane of feudal and imperial curses. Moreover, the so-called institutions of the iron frame, the entire length of the spinal cord of Indian administration, from Panchayat (rural self-government) to national level, has been mutilated and subjugated in the name of suborning them to the ‘rule of the people, for the people and by the people’. Several institutions of the country, including the judiciary, have been distorted and subverted to suit the political class. It is not my intention to write another sterile thesis on the state of Indian administration and judiciary. Such thesis are propounded at regular intervals, several commissions are instituted routinely to examine the system breakdown and several such reports, including reports on police and intelligence reform have been gathering dust if not already eaten up by ants and termites of the system.

I have been advocating this for near about a decade. I would like to draw the attention of the discerning members of the opinion makers, the judiciary, the media, the academia and the intellectuals to think over this loudly and to start a national debate in and outside the Parliament. Such acts are essential for the politicians too. Some day or the other, taking advantage of the weakening fabric of our democracy, some unscrupulous intelligence men may gang up with ambitious Army Brass and change the political texture of the nation and give IB the colours of the Inter Services Intelligence of Pakistan. That will be the most unfortunate day for Indian democracy. India cannot afford to suffer that indignity from which most of the postcolonial regimes in Asia and Africa are suffering.

Indian democracy suffers from the double jeopardy of dynastic parties 'n nepotistic judiciary

India's Judges fare better than its gods as Contempt of Court protects their dignity while its Constitution throws the latter to the wolves for Muslims proclaim that there's no god but Allah and the evangelists propagate that the Hindu deities are false

['A]lamgir [Aurangzeb] came to formulate a very different model of sovereignty for himself and for the empire he ruled. In this new dispensation, the kingdom would be governed not by a charismatic, semi-divine king, but by a impersonal law -- namely, the 'shar'ia' of Hanafi Sufis -- administered by a reconstituted and vastly empowered judiciary guided by a reformed, thoroughly codified legal style. [...] In the courts of local judges in Gujarat, Hindu artisans, merchants and Brahmins commonly invoked the 'shar'ia' in transactions pertaining to buying, selling, renting and mortgaging property, or in pursuing litigation in law courts. Hindu women in particular used Islamic law in their attempts to resist patriarchal domination. The same held true further north. In the Punjabi town of Batala, writes the historian J. S. Grewal, 'the brahmin, the Khatri, the goldsmith and the Hindu carpenter frequented the qazi's court as much as the sayyid and the Muslim mason'. And in Malwa, the vast majority of attesters in court documents, excepting those dealing with Muslim marriages, were non-Muslims. While acknowledging religious difference, moreover, such courts did not draw legal boundaries around India's ethnic or religious communities. Significantly, the word 'shari'a' as used in local courts was not understood as applying to Muslims only, as it is today. Rather it carried the ordinary and non-sectarian meaning of 'legal'. Until the 1770s, when East India Company officials codified separate legal systems for Muslims and Hindus, Islamic law as it was administered in Mughal courts had functioned as common law. 'Alamgir's project of basing Mughal governance and sovereignty on a standardized codification of that law therefore built upon legal practices that, even though applied differently across the empire, were already in place in the Indian countryside.

In recent years, widely reported allegations of judicial misconduct have revealed the extent to which the integrity and impartiality of the higher judiciary has been compromised in our country. These disclosures of suspected venality in some judges of the higher courts have shattered the ineffable image of the judiciary as a vigilant and ultimate protector of the values of a free society governed by law. This grave damage to the judiciary’s image has been caused by none other than some Indian judges, courtesy their tendency to hover around the seats of political power.