The Modi government may reintroduce the National Judicial Appointments Commission Act (NJAC) in Parliament to ostensibly safeguard the interests of the people, as judges cannot be trusted to appoint themselves in secrecy.

Judges of the constitutional courts have silenced iconoclasts among themselves, such as the former Madras high court judge, C.S. Karnan, whose intemperate utterances earned him the dubious distinction of being the first high court judge to serve six months in jail for criminal contempt.

The crusader-activist-lawyer Prashant Bhushan was forced to pay a token sum of one rupee after being sentenced for contempt of court by the former Supreme Court judge, Arun Mishra, who was himself accused of giving pro-government verdicts. Prashant Bhushan’s late father, Shanti Bhushan, who died in 2023, created a sensation when he dared the apex court to send him to jail for alleging eight out of 10 CJIs were “definitely corrupt”.

To return to the present, coming close on the heels of the Rs 15 crore in burnt cash found in the outhouse of Justice Yashwant Varma’s official residence at New Delhi on March 14, a special court on March 29 acquitted Justice Nirmal Yadav, who was charge-sheeted when Rs 15 lakh in cash was delivered to the official residence of another judge from the Punjab and Haryana (P&H) high court, Justice Nirmaljit Kaur. She summoned the police, who found the late additional advocate general Sanjeev Bansal had allegedly sent the cash. Bansal has expired.

Seventeen years after ‘

© Free Press Journal