ON SAME WAVELENGTH: Satpal Jain (centre), National convener of BJP Legal Cell, with party colleague Bandaru Dattatreya and State unit president N. Indrasena Reddy at the first national zonal legal cell convention in Hyderabad on Saturday. - Photo : P.V. Sivakumar

HYDERABAD: Expressing concern over the moves by the Congress Governments to provide reservations to Muslims, former MP and BJP Legal Cell national convenor Satpal Jain has warned the Congress against "playing with fire" for the sake of a few seats in Parliament and Assemblies.

Reservations to Muslims, if not opposed, would result in dividing the people on religious lines and lead to another partition of the country in the long run. "These parties which claim themselves as secularists are advocating communal ideas like reservations to Muslims," he said. Mr. Jain was delivering the inaugural address at the party's 4th State legal convention and the first national zonal convention organised here on Saturday.

Pat for judiciary

Referring to the functioning of the judiciary in the country, he expressed happiness that the timely intervention of the courts in response to some of the public interest litigations helped protect the rights of people. But, there were still some areas of concern in the judicial processes, including the appointment of judges.

The time had come for evolving a mechanism to ensure that the successors of judges who were retiring from service took charge without any delay.

There were also difficulties experienced by the common man to approach the courts, one of the major areas being the restriction of the proceedings to Hindi and English. The regional language should be made as an official language in the High Courts of the respective States. There was also a need for the Bar Council of India to encourage young lawyers from poor background to continue their practice in the initial stages.

Earlier, BJP national secretary Bandaru Dattatreya and party's State president N. Indrasena Reddy voiced concern over the misuse of the judicial processes by the Governments.

Though they were trying to play vote bank politics, the timely intervention of the courts was not allowing the Governments to have its say in the affairs, they said.

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