Executive disorder

The Supreme Court had to walk a delicate line in its ruling on the petition against the Jharkhand governor8217;s decision to invite Shibu S...

The Supreme Court had to walk a delicate line in its ruling on the petition against the Jharkhand governor8217;s decision to invite Shibu Soren to form a government. The Court had to be careful not to step on legislative and executive prerogative, while ensuring that if indeed something akin to a fraud on the Constitution had taken place, it must not go uncensored. If the Court gave directions on how legislative proceedings are to be conducted, it would be accused of surpassing its brief. If the Court failed to intervene, it would be accused of excusing the gratuitous manipulation of discretionary power. On the whole, the Court seems to have balanced these competing considerations. It has sought to ensure that the proceedings are free and fair. This objective has entailed some intervention: an advancement of the floor test, an injunction to protect legislators, a stay on the nomination of an Anglo-Indian representative, and the installation of video cameras to ensure that the proceedings are fair. In deference to the authority of the legislature, it has rightly rejected the demand for external observers.

The court8217;s intervention, in the circumstances, is unexceptionable. The abdication of responsibility by the executive that opened the way for judges to step in as monitors in the legislative domain is not. When checks and balances available to the executive and the legislature are rendered defunct because of a political class that places narrow party interests above well-established democratic norms, somebody has to step in. In a week when legislatures lost a significant fraction of their self-monitoring sovereignty, there is just one consolation. Thankfully, in India it is the courts who have stepped in to iterate procedural proprieties 8212; in other places, dictators have swept in upon sighting the kind of cynicism about politics that the events of the last fortnight threaten to foster.

The Left parties are right to voice apprehension about the implications of the Jharkhand judgment. But they nail the wrong institution. The Supreme Court has reacted to exceptional circumstances 8212; as it did, for instance, in the Best Bakery case, an order incidentally hailed by the Left at the time. The exceptional situation now 8212; as then in Gujarat 8212; is the result of the executive abdicating its responsibility to place procedure above politics. The Jharkhand governor egregiously violated constitutional proprieties. The Centre failed to apply correctives to rectify the situation, leaving the Supreme Court as a site of last appeal. This has been an unfortunate fortnight for Indian democracy. It may be too much to hope that today8217;s Ranchi vote will drain all the accumulated political mistrust and return national politics to a spirit of mutual interest. But it is on such hopes that our democracy has survived.