HIS NEW LORDSHIP

Preceding the man who would preside over the country8217;s judiciary, the first Dalit to do so, are generations that had braved great odds, survived many slights. Their socially prescribed humiliations had followed them till even a couple of generations ago. 8216;8217;Even in Vaikom, the nearby town, Dalits weren8217;t allowed into local restaurants. They had to dig a hole in the ground outside, put a piece of plantain leaf in it and have their food served on it,8217;8217; recalls brother KG Vijayan, now a Deputy Collector with the state government.

Their mother can8217;t forget the past either. 8216;8217;Balan8217;s father would get transferred from court to court and we needed to find new homes to live. But people would often refuse to rent us houses, simply because we are Dalits. Even village barbers would decline to cut our hair, for the same reason. It was often difficult, very difficult.8217;8217;

BORN to a manual labourer who lived and died toiling for local landlords, Gopinathan, Balakrishnan8217;s father, was the first in his family who tried breaking out of the vicious cycle of poverty and deprivation. Gopinathan was focused on going to school, something that lay outside much of the Dalit mindscape of his time. It wasn8217;t easy. He could often forgo food, but textbooks were a problem 8212; he had no money to buy them. 8216;8217;He used to tell me how he would borrow the school texts from his classmate in the neighbourhood in the evenings, sit through the night writing down everything in them and return the books early next morning,8217;8217; says his wife.

Gopinathan did well and passed8212; only to find that most schools with higher classes, run by upper castes, were not too eager to take in Dalits 8212; and many Christian-run schools mostly preferred Christians. So Gopinathan took on a Christian name, Kunhachan Marcos and joined a school and then moved on to St Mary8217;s School at Kuruvilangadu. This is where he ran into another equally determined Dalit student, who became a lifetime friend, KR Narayanan, the former President of India.

8216;8217;Our father used to tell us how it hurt when a teacher there snubbed him for being a Dalit. He had stood up in the class to answer a question, before others could. And the teacher asked him: Do you think a crow could become a stork if it takes a bath?8217;8217; says Balakrishnan8217;s brother Ravindran, now a bank manager.

Gopinathan finished school but remained Marcos, until a Hindu ashram did a 8216;purification8217; rite on him and made him Gopinathan all over again. He still couldn8217;t find a job, so the ashram arranged with a school run by a Brahmin management to take him as a teacher. 8216;8217;They used to make him sign that he got his salary, but would pay him only a portion of it. He had to leave the job soon,8217;8217; says his wife. He later joined as a copyist in a court, bringing up eight kids on a salary that started at Rs 15.

8216;8217;We survived. I was so happy to get my first pair of footwear when I was 14,8217;8217; recalls Vijayan.

There are some heartening memories as well. Sarada remembers how several people of other castes helped them through the hard times. People like Parameswaran Pillai, an upper caste court clerk with her husband, who was locally influential. 8216;8217;He encouraged my husband to go out and mingle with everyone and ignore taunts. When things were bad, he once held my husband to him and told everyone in a crowd that he was his brother. When Balakrishnan became a High Court judge, Pillai had a special puja performed for him and asked me to give the prasad to Balakrishnan before he took office. He said Balakrishnan was his son too.8217;8217;

THIS was where Balakrishnan grew up, walking many kilometres a day to school and back, shifting from school to school as his father was transferred. 8216;8217;He was a calm and soft boy, he never complained, and mostly kept to himself. I remember him sleeping on the floor under the only cot in the room. He would sit up late with his books under the kerosene lamp, and by the time he went to sleep, other kids occupied the cot,8217;8217; his mother remembers.

By the time he was in college, expenses pinched all the more. 8216;8217;His father used to seek help from the lawyers that he knew, to support him. Many local people helped him too, they loved Balakrishnan,8217;8217; she adds. Balakrishnan eventually passed his Master8217;s in law, with a first rank. He enrolled as a lawyer soon after. In 1973, he became a Munsif judge, the same job that had him in awe when he used to take lunch for his father, the court clerk, many years earlier, when his father was still a court shirastadar. After a stint as a subjudge in Alappuzha, he became a Deputy Registrar at the Kerala High Court, which he quit soon to resume his law practice. In 1985, he was made a judge in the Kerala High Court.

BALAKRISHNAN was Chief Justice of the Gujarat and Tamil Nadu High Courts till June 2000, when he was elevated to the Supreme Court where he became Chairman of the National Legal Service Authority and the panel to appoint members of the Central Administrative Tribunal.

As the 37th Chief Justice, KG Balakrishnan will get more than three years in office, much longer than his recent predecessors have had. Balakrishnan will be sworn in on January 15, 2007 and will serve till May 12, 2010.

Present CJI YK Sabharwal, who was appointed on the day of the golden jubilee of the Supreme Court, had just about 14 months. His predecessor, Ramesh Chand Lahoti, served for 17 months from June 1, 2004 when he was elevated as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

There have been longer tenures in the past, though. Dr Justice Adarsh Sein Anand, for instance, had a tenure of slightly more than three years, from October 10, 1998 to November 1, 2001. Another former judge, Chief Justice AM Ahmadi too had a similar tenure from October 25, 1994 to March 24, 1997.

Balakrishnan8217;s rulings are said to reflect a strict legal and constitutional approach based on precedents. A case in point is the Bihar Legislative Assembly one. He dissented from the majority view of the other four judges that the presidential proclamation on May 2005 dissolving the Bihar Legislative Assembly was unconstitutional.

Some of his important judgments include those in the case that involved the constitutional implications of Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi deciding to advance Assembly polls, the one on providing free mid-day meals to school children countrywide 8212;he considers it his most satisfying order till date 8212; the case pertaining to admissions to self financing colleges in Kerala that he handled as part of a nine-member constitution bench, among others.

As a decorative arch lauding him straddles the village road to his home in Vellassery, Balakrishnan looks calmly ahead at the new job that he would hold till 2010. Judges, he says, need to be humane, and connect to the affected.

He should know.