Justice L. Narsimha Reddy has been
at it again. Seamlessly he sees the connect between the paramount parchment
(the constitution) and its ethos. Time and again, you notice in his court a
reluctance to hear officialdom defend itself by the word of the law even at the
cost of the spirit. He sees no conflict and refuses the defence of any
refractive error .
Dealing recently with the judgement relating to the power of the Government to
keep registration of properties under the Emmar Project in abeyance, he made a
number of observations, that may not earn the approval of the purist or the
appreciation of the government. He was not loitering into an area of prohibited
thoroughfare. He in fact prefaced his interim order with the observation that
in the course of making interim orders courts normally do not make observations
as the ones he did but justified the exception stating :However when the court
is faced with a situation which has the effect of shaking the very foundations
of the society, or damaging the social and moral fibre, it cannot remain a mute
spectator”
The order made by the judge could have come as a surprise to a government that
obviously believed in closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. More
important was the sensitivity that the court introduced to the entire concept
of forgetting the experience of the past. Referring to history and the
experience of the East India Company, he lamented at the “look out for
investment” literally by the government and faulted the failure to ensure that
the economy finds builders (pun un intended) from within. He said very
poignantly One would only wonder as to why it did not occur to those in the
power from time to time as to how far it is safe to the leave country’s
resources to foreign companies, when it had to struggle for 200 years to get
rid of one foreign company in which thousands of patriots had attained
martyrdom”. He stopped short of warning the country and its policy makers that
a country that does not learn from history is doomed to repeat its mistakes. He
was not waxing eloquence, he was not talking politics. He was also not being
exaggeratedly critical of the government, as some may say. He simply rang the
bell of alarm.
The order not only is a call in the context of a growing tendency to get
foreign investment in the name of development but also in the context of a
growing insensitivity towards the common man. On the one hand governments go
over board with projects and programmes said to alleviate poverty and on the
other treat the common man and the citizen as some kind of a needless nuisance.
Then comes the designer fig leaf: Policy.
The order of the judge, albeit an interim order in a pending writ petition
tackles the subtle swing – nay brazen motility from a preamble declaration of
being socialist to a behaviour that is not. Identifying the paradigm shift
Justice Reddy did not restrict the space of governance but faulted the pattern
“ a phenomenal change appears to have taken place in the approach of
Governments . They have chosen to evolve policies and taken decisions which are
aimed at promoting the rich and to create luxuries for them, even by bending or
amending laws, wherever necessary” , he noticed.
It is needless to recall the many passages that voice concern. It is sufficient
to state that the order is exactly what a constitutional court is required to
do : play watch dog and caution the citizenry against failure to be vigilant.
The order comes not a day too early. The writing on the wall is now even a
judicial order. We can ignore it at our own peril. Borders are not always about
geographical contours, they have economic implants too. Lets wake up. Even in
the global villages, name plates are not destroyed.