JUDICIARY VS GOVERNMENT

PRIME Minister Manmohan Singh made a pertinent point at the Commonwealth Law Conference in Hyderabad on Sunday when he observed that “while the power of judicial review must be used to enforce accountability, it must never be used to erode the legitimate growth assigned to the other branches of the government”. He obviously meant to point out that the three pillars of democracy — the legislature, the executive and the judiciary — have their clearly defined and separate functions as given in the Constitution. This constitutional scheme of things should never be disturbed in the interest of growth of each of these institutions. Each institution may have its failings, but under all circumstances “it has to be ensured that the basic structure of our Constitution is not subordinated to the political impulses of the moment or to the will of the transient majorities”, as Dr Manmohan Singh pointed out.
He made these meaningful observations after Justice A. K. Ganguly of the Supreme Court described as “shameless” behaviour of the government in allowing Rural Development Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh to remain in the Union Cabinet despite the apex court having passed strictures on him when he was the Chief Minister of Maharashtra. But this is not the only provocation that might have prompted the Prime Minister to remind the judiciary of how far it can go to exercise its right of judicial review. The government has been taken to task by the court while handling cases relating to the 2G spectrum allocation, the appointment of the Central Vigilance Commissioner, the Niira Radia tapes, the food security issue, etc.
It is true that the government’s failures on various fronts have been responsible for judicial overreach, resulting in the situation in which the constitutional scheme of things is getting threatened. If the executive had played its role as responsibly as possible, what we find today would not have been there. But this argument can be given in the case of every key institution forming the bedrock of our democracy. There is need to discuss the issue threadbare so that our constitutional democracy continues to acquire more and more strength with its unwavering commitment to the rule of law.