The former Chief Justice of the Delhi High Court Justice A.P. Shah said here on Tuesday that the Supreme Court’s judgment in the Justice Loya death case was “utterly wrong and jurisprudentially incorrect”.
Justice Shah was speaking at the release of a book by the former Union Minister Arun Shourie, Anita Gets Bail , a critique of the functioning of the judiciary in India. Summarising Mr. Shourie’s critique of the Supreme Court’s judgment that no enquiry was needed into the death of Justice Loya — who was hearing a petition relating to the Sohrabuddin encounter case, in which Amit Shah, now BJP president, was an accused — Justice Shah said, “In my opinion, the judgment in the judge Loya case is utterly wrong and jurisprudentially incorrect.”
He related how a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court concluded that all enquiries be closed “because this is the final word on this controversy”.
From HC to SC
Before articulating this critique of the judgment rejecting an enquiry into Justice Loya’s death, which came after Mr. Shourie’s book went to press, Justice Shah narrated the author’s summary of the sequence of events, underlining that a case that should have ordinarily been heard by the Bombay High Court landed up as a petition in the Supreme Court and was assigned to Justice Arun Mishra’s bench.
The petition in the SC came after a petition seeking an enquiry into the judge’s death had been filed in the Bombay High Court after the news publication Caravan published a story in which some of Justice Loya’s family members refused to accept that he died of a sudden heart attack.
“The Supreme Court acted as a court of appeal and granted some sort of an acquittal without the benefit of the judgment of the trial court,” Justice Shah said.
Speaking after Justice Shah, former Chief Justice of India Justice RM Lodha commended the book and underlined the importance of the independence of the judiciary from the executive.
Mr Shourie in his address at the end of the session hit out at what he called the executive’s attempt to undermine the judiciary and the latter’s role of “convenience to the executive”.
He exhorted senior lawyers in the audience to “counsel the Chief Justice of India (Dipak Misra)”.
“Today, there is a well-planned, systematic assault.... The mentality is totalitarian, meaning total control over every geographical and institutional space,” he said. He added that it was time to “check them on every manouevre”.
Criticising the rejection of the name of Justice KM Joseph sent from the SC collegium for appointment as a Supreme Court judge, Mr. Shourie said that the CJI could have said there would be no oath-taking ceremony unless both names sent by the collegium were accepted.
“Today we are getting accustomed to a new normal,” Mr. Shourie said, hitting out at the newly appointed BJP deputy chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir for saying the gang-rape of a child in Kathua was a “small incident”.
