Introduction:

• The below article deals with assessment of whether Indian Judiciary is really free from political influence?
• According to the author there are series of instances where judges outright favour particular political affiliations.
• Therefore, the author stresses for the need for an effective ‘Legal Culture’ to maintain Judicial independence (free from political influence).
• Once a Judge takes an oath to uphold the Constitution, his/her past connections or inclinations, should not weigh in their decision making process.

Independence of Judiciary

We know that our Constitution is designed to ensure that judges can do their work “independent” of government influence:

• fixed salaries
• security of tenure and
• an appointments process that is insulated from executive control

Independence, however, means something more. It also requires that judges perform their constitutional role independent of personal biases, political and moral beliefs, and partisan ideologies.

While adjudicating, a judge should not turn into a politician.

At all times, he/she is bound to maintain primary fidelity to the law and the Constitution:

• to the text of legal instruments,
• to the canons of legal interpretation, and
• to the body of judicial precedent that holds the field

– These are crucial checks upon judicial power.

‘Role of Legal Culture’

Judicial independence depends on judges recognising that law and adjudication must remain autonomous from partisan politics in important ways.

Judges need to be insulated from any external control; they should be accountable only to themselves, and their own sense of the limits of their constitutional role.

However, accountability only to oneself is a very weak form of constraint. The temptation to overstep is always immense, more so when such immense power has been placed in one’s own hands.

Therefore, it is here that “legal culture” plays a critical role in establishing judicial accountability.

• A Legal Culture – which has a set of unwritten, but clearly established, norms that determine what is or is not acceptable in the process of adjudication.
• A Legal Culture – which has not sprung up out of a vacuum, but created and nurtured by judges, lawyers, legal academics, the press and the citizenry.

The roots of the crisis and where the legal culture got exactly failed?

Post Independence

• During the first 17 years of India’s republic, by and large, the Supreme Court reposed faith in Parliament. Most MPs were freedom fighters, and the court trusted them.
• But as amendment after amendment was used to undo the core values of the Constitution, the court had to apply the brakes in 1967.
• The court refused to trust elected representatives with the amendment process, and ruled that fundamental rights could not be curtailed except by the Constituent Assembly.

1980s

• In the 1980s, there was a rapid expansion of judicial power. Supreme Court began to dispense with procedural checks upon its power.
• Some of these steps were important and necessary, such as allowing “public interest” cases to be filed on behalf of those who were unable to access the courts.
• However, other steps were double-edged swords, such as diluting the evidentiary standards required to prove disputed facts, and vastly expanding the courts’ discretion to shape and fashion remedies. (for complete justice)

The 1980s Supreme Court was highly praised for this. Judges were painted as crusading heroes.

1990s and 2000s

• By the 1990s and the 2000s, under the misleading label of “judicial activism”, the court was beginning to engage in a host of administrative activities, from managing welfare schemes to “beautifying cities” to overseeing anti-corruption initiatives.
• The constitutional court had become a Supreme ‘Administrative’ Court.
• This, too, was justified on the altar of necessity: politicians were corrupt, bureaucrats were inefficient, and things didn’t move. Someone had to come and clean it all up.
• Judiciary was viewed as an infallible solution to all social problems.
• In other words, the Judiciary was considered to be flawless, incapable of making mistakes or being wrong.

Is Indian Judiciary really flawless? Is it free from political influence?

Some of the judgments show that Judiciary has failed to maintain its legal culture and has many times sided with government’s agenda –

• Recent Meghalaya High Court Judge Justice S.R. Sen’s ill-advised and ill-judged remarks (had some sort of biasness towards current government or political posturing)
• A judge, who wrapped up in patriotic zeal, did not stop to think whether he is authorised to compel all cinema halls in the nation to play the national anthem.
• Another did not consider whether he has the power to mandate that every student in Tamil Nadu must study the Tirukkural.
• Judiciary taking over the entire process of preparing a National Register of Citizens (NRC).
• The record of the courts in protecting civil rights has also been a mixed one. In far too many cases, courts have tended to defer to the executive and the government.

Courts simply missed the thought whether the Constitution ever contemplated a task such as this to fall within the judicial domain.

Conclusion

Above judgments like the national anthem order, the Tirukkural order, the NRC process, and Justice Sen’s recent foray – raise an altogether more frightening prospect: that of an “executive court”.

**An “executive court” – is a court whose moral and political compass finds itself in alignment with the government of the day, and one that has no compunctions in navigating only according to that compass.

Instead of checking and limiting government power, an executive court finds itself marching in lockstep with the government, and being used to set the seal of its prestige upon more controversial parts of the government’s agenda.