Supreme Court judge Markandey Katju retired today after a career that will be remembered not only for his bold judgments,which some found controversial,but also for his frank,strong views on a wide range of subjects. The corrupt should be hanged from the lamp post as that is the only way of getting rid of corruption in the country, he once said,long before Anna Hazare demanded a death sentence for the corrupt. Other issues he had expressed views on included Mirza Ghalib the poet,Indo-Pak prisoners,honour killings,extra-judicial killings and corruption in the judiciary. At the farewell today,Chief Justice of India S H Kapadia said Justice Katju has lost neither the courage to speak the truth nor his concern for the common man. When he was Chief Justice of the Madras High Court,Markandey Katju,while ruling on a constitutional question of the relationship between the judiciary,the legislature and the executive,had emphasised judicial restraint and the impropriety of the judiciary trying to infiltrate into the other two domains. In April this year,he demanded from a public platform that Ghalib he is a patron of the Kalidas-Ghalib Foundation be given the Bharat Ratna. On March 8,a Bench headed by him delivered a judgment allowing passive euthanasia for patients who are brain dead or in a permanent vegetative state. In June 17,he made a personal appeal to the Prime Minister to release on humanitarian grounds 80-year-old Pakistani citizen Khalil Chishty,lodged in Ajmer jail since 1992. The BJP objected to the appeal,finding it odd coming from a Supreme Court,but the Prime Minister asked the Home Minister to examine it. Something is rotten in the Allahabad High Court, he said last year,quoting Shakespeare in an indictment of some judges for passing orders on extraneous considerations. The High Court contested the observation but the Supreme Court refused to expunge it. On honour killings,he was of the opinion that convicts in such cases should be awarded death. He held that mere membership of a banned organisation doesnt make a person a terrorist or a criminal,while he favoured the death penalty as a solution to end the menace of fake encounters by police as well as those involved in dowry deaths. Of his controversial comments in the Supreme Court,one came while hearing the case of a Muslim student who wanted to be allowed to sport a beard against school rules. Katju said it could lead to the Talibanisation of India. Later,after protests,he expressed regret and withdrew the remark. Katju is a Kashmiri Brahmin,son of Allahabad High Court S N Katju and grandson of freedom fighter Kailash Nath Katju who,apart from being a reputable lawyer,served as Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh,Governor of West Bengal and Orissa,as well as Union Law,Home and Defence Minister.
