Clean-up in judiciary is a farce

To begin with, in May this year, the then Chief Justice of India, Justice B N Kirpal, asked the then chief justice of the Punjab and Haryana high court, Justice A B Saharya, to inquire into media reports alleging the complicity of high court judges in the Punjab Public Service Commission PPSC scam.

Three months later, Saharya submitted his report indicting three high court judges. But Kirpal did not deem it fit to make any attempt to get those indicted judges out of the system. Instead, he recommended the transfer of one of the three judges to Guwahati.

It was against this backdrop that Kirpal8217;s successor, Justice G B Pattanaik, ordered a second inquiry in November into the role of judges in the PPSC scam. But the report of the second inquiry, headed by the then chief justice of the Andhra Pradesh high court, Justice A R Lakshmanan, and submitted on December 8, confirmed the indictment of only two judges while exonerating the third, Justice M L Singhal.

No indication has so far been given on how Singhal has been exonerated in the face of incontrovertible evidence against him. Worse, no reason has been given for the finding that the misconduct disclosed in the case of the other two judges, Justice Amarbir Singh Gill and Justice Mehtab Singh Gill, is not serious enough to warrant their removal.

Justice Pattanaik took the view that he was bound by the Lakshmanan committee8217;s report and accordingly gave the two Gills the option of doing something on their own about their indictment. Amarbir Singh Gill responded by proceeding on leave till his retirement in May 2003.

But as Mehtab Singh Gill did not bother to react in any manner to his indictment, Pattanaik passed an order deprecating his misconduct. The stricture actually makes little difference to Mehtab Singh Gill as he has been permitted to function as any other judge of the high court.

Thus, all the three judges indicted by Justice Saharya after a detailed inquiry have got away lightly.

In retrospect, the only reason the system seems to have resorted to a second inquiry is to find a justification for not acting on the first. After hearing some witnesses on just one day, the Lakshmanan committee came up with an amazing display of prevarication. On the one hand, it indicted the two Gills in what is undoubtedly a corruption scam.

But on the other hand, it held that the charges against them are not grave enough to call for their impeachment. The implication of the Lakshmanan committee report is that corruption is not an impeachable misconduct. This makes a mockery of the axiom acknowledged by the Supreme Court on more than one occasion that the standards of conduct expected of judges are higher and stricter. If anything, the standards appear to have been lowered and relaxed to avoid taking action against the three judges.

There is another very damaging message that has come out of this whole charade on account of Mehtab Singh Gill8217;s lucky escape. The other Gill is forced to stay away from the court simply because he took his indictment seriously and proceeded on leave. But Mehtab Singh Gill, despite the same degree of indictment, continues to sit in the court and exercise all the judicial powers that go with it. The only reason Mehtab Singh Gill is better off is because he has brazened it out. Not exactly the kind of lesson we would like other judges to learn from the Punjab episode.

But all this pales in comparison with the outrageous inaction on a sex scam involving a judge of the Rajasthan high court, Justice Arun Madan. On December 14, a committee headed by the chief justice of the Punjab and Haryana high court, Justice B K Roy, submitted a report to Pattanaik indicting Madan on the charge of propositioning a woman doctor in exchange for a judicial favour.

Yet, Pattanaik put off taking any action against Madan by seizing on a disclosure in the report that there were also allegations of corruption against him. Just before he demitted office on December 19, Pattanaik asked the committee to go back to Rajasthan to probe the corruption aspect as well.

Thus, in the Rajasthan case, corruption came in handy as an excuse to delay action against a judge on the finding of sexual misbehaviour. The subversion from within of judicial accountability in Rajasthan and Punjab suggests that the judiciary scores over other sectors on the scale of impunity.