“The Constitution is evolving constantly” As we near completion of sixty years of formation of the Indian Republic, it is crucial to review the workings of the Indian Constitution and analyse how the definitions, principles and guidelines enshrined in the Constitution have evolved in the present context. Former Attorney General for India Ashok H. Desai…
What goes around, comes around. Two interesting things happened earlier this month, both concerning the Supreme Court. Starting February 6, Chief Justice Dipak Misra appeared to offer a truce in the stand off with his four most senior colleagues when, as “Master of the Roster’, he set up a new system of allocating cases by…
Former Chief Justice of India, Justice PN Bhagwati, underlines the shortcomings in the arbitration system in India, in a discussion with Publishing Director Chaitanya Kalbag. He stresses the need to make arbitration cheap and speedy through the combined efforts of lawyers and arbitrators and moots legislation, if need be, in order to make it an…
Poorly paid, snowed under by a huge backlog of pending cases, buffeted by the government’s attempts to manipulate judicial processes and appointments, our judiciary has not been able to preserve its independence. At the same time, our Constitution has been considerably tampered with by the legislature. What are the causes of this state of ,…
So much is being written about political prisoners in India these days, that the layman might succumb to the temptation of focusing more on the issue than on its human aspect. Jayaprakash Narayan’s Prison Diary, as well as that of Snehlata Reddy, for instance, have offered some glimmer of the goings—on behind India prison walls.…
“UPON MY WORD: India’s prisons are stuck in a time warp Strange how time’s machine travels back and forth at warp speed. Two hundred and fifty-one years ago, Siraj-ud-Daulah demonstrated what an overcrowded prison can do to human beings with the Black Hole of Calcutta. “Figure to yourself, my friend, if possible, the situation of…
Sexual harassment can be crude and overt or very subtle, but you know you are being sexually harassed when you experience it. Those around you may even be oblivious to it, especially if the dominant work culture is male. Harassment is upsetting, threatening, and insidious. It can be obliquely transmitted through glance or gesture or…
Titled Judiciary: Attacks and Survival, the speech had been long in coming, the speaker delayed, first by an attack of diabetes in March and then by the postponement of the Dussehra break. On October 29, as Justice Vidyaranya Dattatreya Tulzapurkar of the Supreme Court finally faced an invited audience at the Symbiosis Law College in…
Although it is a blasphemous thought, it has cropped up in many a legal mind during the last few weeks: if bets were placed on the Supreme Court’s decisions, only a very shrewd bookie would emerge victorious. So unpredictable have the thought-processes of the nation’s highest court become. A three-judge bench consisting of Chief Justice…
The salaried middle classes have time and again fallen prey to the Government’s more capricious economic decisions. But, one group that has suffered the most from constantly rising costs of living is the large, amorphous mass of the nation’s pensioners. Bereft of a common voice, nearly three million retired government employees and defence personnel have…
The India-Rubber man, Jagannath Mishra, had done it again. For months, the Bihar chief minister’s political fate had hung in the balance while the Supreme Court heard the Patna Urban Cooperative Bank case. Then, last fortnight, Mishra’s fortunes took a sudden upward swing. On December 16, the Supreme Court held, by a two-one majority, that…
Convicted killers Billa and Ranga were expected to make headlines last fortnight. Make news, they certainly did, but not the way everybody anticipated. Instead of being walked to the gallows on the morning of Sunday. November 8. 1981, in retribution for the brutal murder of Gita and Sanjay Chopra on August 26, 1978, the two…
So Ham-Handed and desperate for representatives of any stature in Assam has the Congress(I) become that it has jettisoned all concern for decorum and dignity in the loftiest institution of the land, the Supreme Court. Exactly four weeks after he delivered a judgment that granted Bihar Chief Minister Jagannath Mishra a reprieve from trial for…
The Quality of justice seemed to be under tremendous strain last fortnight. At issue was the vexatious question of capital punishment. As usual, the shock waves emanated from an indecisive Supreme Court. In November 1981, the court had stayed executions all over the country after it was contended in the case of Kuljit Singh (alias…
Anticlimax has become the boon companion of the Supreme Court. When the court reopened on July 18 after its summer vacation, it was shadowed by the cloud raised by stays granted on more than 20 executions of condemned murderers throughout the country. The flurry of stay orders stemmed from a May 6 ruling by a…
Importune your Maker, but not with impunity My family cracks up every time we watch Noises off, the rambunctious 1992 comedy. Maybe we find it funnier because we live in such a noisy nation. As India enters its 72nd year of freedom, we should declare independence from noise, and vow to liberate ourselves from religious…