Waiting for our Messiah!

Another imagined Messiah is gone, now our hope is on the next one, what he will do? Will justice be the basis of our society? Will the rule of law be followed? Will, there be an end to the hypocrisy? With all these questions we welcome the new Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. But with all these questions a constant expectation will remain, our search for a Messiah to strongly hold together the paralyzed administration of justice in our society. The tenure of CJI N.V. Ramana started with the statements and speeches which shook the world of our intellectuals. Finally, they had imagined their dreams of just society coming true but like always it all ended with a sad ending giving us reality checks. Finally, there is a CJI who dares to speak and criticize the contemporary situation of the country. We have got our messiah, who will save us from all this political turmoil, and now with the wind, he is gone stating that “Administration of justice is a challenge”, the farewell comes with mixed feelings of grief and hope. What will happen next? Are we going to witness another daring judge?

Well, the problem lies in the basic demand of ‘we the people’. We are so much obsessed with the strong man politics that we want to fight fire with fire, we want a strong man to crush the regime and in the desire for all this we are diverting ourselves from the basic principle of dealing with things at the structural level to a messiah formation.

CJI N.V. Ramana for sure knows one thing, i.e. how to divert the intellectual lobby of the society. All this proves that a lawyer is still a lawyer, one knows how to manipulate and extract consideration, be it in the nature of money or the fame in society. From crediting Media as ‘Kangaroo Courts’ to pointing out the existing challenges of the Judiciary, CJI never shies away from giving any remark or statement on the contemporary situation but in the end, it comes with the continuation of the same existing issues.

From pending petition regarding abrogation of Art. 370, Pegasus spyware, the legality of UAPA, the review petitions against the controversial July 27th judgment upholding the provisions of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) giving vast powers to the Enforcement Directorate (ED) for arrest, raid, and attachment and imposing stringent conditions for bail, to the plea challenging the premature release of 11 convicts in the Bilkis Bano case, and many other, nothing has been done yet. Everything is pending as it was earlier, with the delay leading to the scope for the plea of prospective overruling by the state, i.e., now the judicial action to change the existing conditions will bring more chaos and disorders. So, the end-note is to let it be this time, from the next time we will take care of such acts. 

The CJI ended his tenure by saying that “he discharged his duties in whatever way possible” and “a retiring person has no value in this country”. I think he forgot about the former CJI who is MP now or about the Chief Justices who are Commissioners or foreign delegates. A retired person has no value but it is not the same as a retiring judge.  What we should infer from this statement is that he is regretting his remarks or that he has pleased the intellectuals but failed to do the same with the government. His duty was not to make a public statement but to discharge the workload of cases and in doing so uphold the faith of people in this democracy but unfortunately nothing like this happened.

Now, leaving aside whatever he has done and focusing on the main question this incident brings upon us is, why we still believe in messiah figures to save us from all this gruesome chaos. Why we cannot make a structural approach to all this? When we all know that the rule of law is not in isolation to the political and economic developments. The approach or dependence upon individuals reflects the system’s immaturity to understand the vulgarity of this regime, which is based on the agenda of oppressing and exploiting the ones who are at the periphery. The structural approach means the revolution in the whole system which is developing the structures where even a monk has to steal a Ferrari in order to survive the competitive system. Moreover, the faith in the formal structure of the law, the structure which is founded on the ignorance of pre-legal development of force and coercion will never lead us to the state of justice we thrive for. The present formal structure of law which ignores the influence of politics and economics in the functioning of the institutions can never thrive for justice because the ignorance of external factors in itself reflects the elitism of the system. Then why do we still keep repeating the same mistakes? Or it is just because we have accepted that our means to the end lies in others’ hands and we cannot do anything to change it because the intellectual elites are still away from the regime’s hands.

By: Himanshoo Atri