Roll-back of the judicial code?

There is no getting away from the mean purpose for which Their Lordships in Chandigarh shed all inhibitions and struck work for the first time in the history of the Indian judiciary. They went on mass casual leave just to protest the notices Justice Roy had served on two of them, Justices Viney Mittal and Virender Singh, for accepting free membership in a club embroiled in litigation. Those notices were an unforeseen fallout of a PIL Justice Roy had initiated early this year against the controversial Forest Hill Golf and Country Club for diverting 381 acres of forest land near Chandigarh for non-forest purposes without the necessary approval of the Centre under the Forest Conservation Act, 1980.

Justices Mittal and Virender Singh were among an array of public servants, including Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh and top bureacrats and police officers, who had been enrolled without any payment either as ‘‘honorary’’ or ‘‘ex officio’’ members in the club. Evidently, the club owner, B.S. Sandhu, coopted the public servants as a strategy to bend the state apparatus to his own ends. Sandhu needed to do so because he built the entire resort after the Centre had actually rejected his application for permission. If he had the gumption to go ahead with the project illegally, it is reasonable to suspect that Sandhu was counting on his VIP members, beholden as they were to him, to serve as his sword and shield.

The question that legitimately exercises the public is, how could two high court judges associate themselves with such a scam? Justice Roy obviously shared that public concern when he sent notices to Justices Mittal and Virender Singh. But what followed was even more shocking. Practically all the judges of the high court ganged up against Justice Roy on the issue of judicial accountability. They put down in writing that he had no authority to question them. Justice Roy wrote back saying that he would continue to discharge his duties, both judicial and administrative, ‘‘without any fear of anyone.’’ It was then the judges struck work in a totally indefensible action.

The club membership and the consequent strike fly in the face of the model code of conduct adopted by the judiciary in 1997. Formally called ‘Restatement of Values of Judicial Life’, the code begins by stressing that no judge should be allowed to erode the ‘‘credibility’’ of the institution, ‘‘whether in official or personal capacity.’’ So, when the strike took place in April, it was apt on the part of the then chief justice of India, V.N. Khare, to have called the three senior-most judges of the high court to Delhi and pulled them up for behaving as trade unionists. Khare also showed them a letter he had received from President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam expressing anguish at the strike. The signal that came then from the CJI’s office was that action would be taken at least against those who had instigated the strike and blotted the record of the judiciary. The subsequent silence has belied that signal.

If Justice Lahoti is now saying that no action is being contemplated, he is clearly rolling back a process that began in Justice Khare’s time. Incidentally, Justice Khare was the last of the 22 Supreme Court judges to have signed the model code in 1997. It would be sad if the judges who joined the apex court subsequently did not feel as committed to the model code. Justice Lahoti would do well to remember, particularly, the last clause of the model code: ‘‘Every judge must at all times be conscious that he is under the public gaze and there should be no act or omission by him which is unbecoming of the high office he occupies and the public esteem in which that office is held.’’ Members of the public, from the president downwards, are watching you, Sir.