The Hindu : Opinion / Editorials : A commendable act of self-correction

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Thursday, May 12, 2005

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A commendable act of self-correction

In an unusual recognition of its own fallibility, the Supreme Court has withdrawn an order it passed hardly three weeks ago. That order specified which of the judges of the Patna High Court would constitute the bench to hear Union Railway Minister Lalu Prasad's petition challenging the consent given by the Governor to prosecute him in the fodder scam. Mr. Prasad had objected to a particular judge and had even offered to communicate his reasons in confidence to the apex court, but a larger constitutional issue was involved here as well. Under Article 225 of the Constitution, which retains the powers of the judges of the high courts as they were before the Constitution came into force, the power to constitute benches and allocate work to the judges vests with the Chief Justices of the High Courts. The Supreme Court is no doubt the superior court that hears appeals from the high courts, has the final say on what the law is, and has wide-ranging judicial powers — but it does not exercise administrative jurisdiction over the high courts in such matters as the constitution of benches. When the obvious error of its earlier order was brought to its notice, the same bench of the Supreme Court has shown a commendable readiness to withdraw it and leave it to the Chief Justice of the Patna High Court to constitute the bench. Interestingly, a similar objection was raised just a few days earlier in the Patna High Court where the Chief Justice judiciously chose to wait until the Supreme Court considered the issue again.

This is of course not the first time that the Supreme Court has withdrawn its order in a high profile case. In the mid-1980s, it ordered the transfer of the trial of a former Chief Minister of Maharashtra, A. R. Antulay, from a special court to the Bombay High Court but on realising the error, it rescinded its own order four years later. It admitted that the court in its "anxiety to facilitate the parties to have a speedy trial" gave directions without "conscious awareness" of the legal implications. In high profile cases involving political figures where allegations of even judicial bias and interference with the course of justice fly about, it is difficult to hold the zeal to do justice in line with the procedure established by law, which would seem slow moving. In the Bihar case, the line between the reach of a judicial order and the jurisdiction over the administration of the High Court was quite thin, and it is this line the Supreme Court realised it had crossed. Its commendable act of self-correction should make it more conscious of similar boundaries that exist between the judiciary on the one hand and the executive and the legislature on the other. These lines are not always observed as, for instance, in the case of the Jharkhand Assembly where the Supreme Court, disregarding the normal order of business and the procedure followed in the House, substituted its own procedure for the trial of strength.

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