Tamil Nadu   

"Judicial activism encroaches on popular sovereignty"

Staff Reporter

It is curbing people's rights and people's movements: Prabhat Patnaik

CHENNAI: Judicial activism encroaching on roles of the executive and legislature is a popular complaint, according to Prabhat Patnaik, Vice-Chairman of the Kerala State Planning Commission. He says the more dangerous point is that it encroaches on popular sovereignty. "It is curbing people's rights and people's movements."

"Creamy layer" concept

Addressing the Tamil Nadu conference of the All India Lawyers Union (AILU), Dr. Patnaik condemned the trend typified by the Supreme Court's recent ruling on application of the "creamy layer" concept for Scheduled Castes and Tribes. He called on the judiciary to "wake up" and handle the problem on its own.

The judiciary was being used as a tool of the new middle class created by globalisation, he said. From independence, there had been "a tension between popular democracy and the desire of the ruling class to establish itself," a tension that has risen with the arrival of "neo-liberalism", which pits a parliamentary process that empowers the poor against an economic process that enfeebles them.

"Because they [the new middle class] can't get their way through democratic means, they want the judiciary to go behind the backs of the people," said Dr. Patnaik, recalling that the executive under Indira Gandhi and the BJP-led legislature had also tried to crush people's rights.

"I used to be a great advocate of the PIL [public interest litigation]," he said, regretting that it had become a mechanism to propel judicial activism.

In another part of the AILU seminar on globalisation, Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharjee, Kolkata Mayor and senior advocate, argued against allowing foreign law firms to operate in India. "Lawyers are vehicles of establishment of rights. Once these vehicles are destroyed, foreign vehicles will not travel down the village lanes, but only the Rajpaths," he said, questioning the commitment of foreign lawyers to Indian constitutional obligations.

P. Sainath, The Hindu 's Rural Affairs Editor, said globalisation has created "two Indias", a tiny elite which has benefited from neo-liberal policies and the large majority for whom it "has meant globalisation of prices and Indianisation of incomes".

Earlier in the day, the conference was inaugurated by AILU-TN president N.G.R. Prasad. West Bengal Assembly Speaker Hashim Abdul Halim called on the union's lawyers to "become a weapon of struggle in the hands of the people".

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