Lawyers rebuke Narendra Modi's remarks, call it an attack on the judiciary's independence

NEW DELHI: Senior lawyers were critical of PM Modi’s remarks on Sunday in which he said there was a need to introspect over whether people he described as "five-star activists" were driving the judiciary. "This is an extremely sorry state of affairs, a clumsy attack on the judicial functioning of the courts and a direct encroachment on the independence of the judiciary," said Supreme Court Bar Association (SCBA) president Dushyant Dave.
The PM had undermined the judges of the top court and the concept of PIL, which has benefited the country and its citizens. But senior advocate Ashok Kumar Ganguly took a different view. Former PM Manmohan Singh had also spoken of judicial overreach at the last such conference, he pointed out. It had become routine for the executive and the judiciary to keep trying to point out that each was exceeding its limits, he said. He blamed this on the judiciary taking on too many PILs.

He cited SC Central Empowered Committee’s work on forests in this regard. The PM is possibly suggesting that the courts do a balancing act and nudge non-functioning authorizes into functioning rather than take them over, Ganguly said. "The PM forgets that the Rs 40 lakh crore he has collected from spectrum and coal auctions is thanks to the ‘five-star’ activists," he said. "UPA may have allocated the coal blocks, but the BJP governments in Chhattisgarh, MP and Jharkhand were the ones who had recommended it." "The likes of Prashant Bhushan have done great service to the country. This is an extremely crude attempt to silence them. We strongly condemn the statement."


Senior advocate Raju Ramachandran said past governments too have legitimately expressed their opinion over judicial activism or said each organ should stay within their sphere, but a "reference in part to cases and persons is wholly unbecoming. It is an aspersion on the independence of the judiciary and totally unwarranted".