Hopes from DY Chandrachud; Deepening poverty; Centre complicit in Bilkis Bano injustice
Opinion Watch
DY Chandrachud now lead Justice
Judiciary in India shines with a few headline instances, and dooms millions of people with its rotten justice delivery system. Each Chief Justice of India after assuming office is faced with just one expectation that the pendency of cases would be addressed, but tenures end and the issue lingers on.
The Times of India in its Editorial has said the onus to deal with the pendency of cases is not solely with the CJI, but also with the government. The daily underlines that the Centre hasn’t shown any urgency to amend its heartburn over the quashing of the National Judicial Appointments Commission.
The daily also blames the Centre for laws which should be in dustbin such as sedition and prohibition, while arguing that laws dealing with sexual assaults and divorce need finer touches to weed out clauses which clog the judiciary.
The Pioneer has also listed out hopes from Justice Chandrachud, who would take oath of office on November 9 for over two years term, while reminding that he is the son of India’s longest serving Chief Justice of India Justice Yeshwant Vishnu Chandrachud, who was in the office during 1978-85.
Justice Chandrachud has authored some of the landmark judgments, including privacy, but it’s evident that a rule-based national eco-system requires a system that sticks with procedure, while eliminating all scopes for individuals to bring in the scourge of biases to muddy the clean governance waters.
Deepening poverty
The Covid-19 pandemic is proving to be an alibi to wash off all acts of governance failures, and poverty is one such agenda on which the Narendra Modi-led government at the Centre needs to answer some really serious questions.
The World Bank has in its report — Poverty and Shared Prosperity, 2022 — said that India accounts for 80 per cent of the 70 million people in the world who fell below the poverty line in 2020 of $2.15 per day. The Economic Times in its Editorial has called the outcome of the report a setback for the country. The daily stated that India is home to 229 million poor people, while underlining that 90 per cent of the poor live by the countryside. Indeed, the business daily noted that UNDP Report is not comparable with that of the World Bank on account of different parameters. The UNDP Report has stated that India pulled out 140 million people out of poverty between 2015-16 and 2019-21, which the ET has said it may have faced reversals because of the pandemic.
The saddening part is that the expenditure under Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act is at record high, free grain scheme is running since October 2020 while being a cash guzzler for 80 crore people and there is a gung-ho among the Centre and the state governments to outbid each other with their versions of freebies, but still India fails to tackle poverty. Accompanying hunger index report put out recently and ‘lynched’ by the government spokespersons should be a cause for worry. The sad part is that poverty has risen for the first time since Independence. This calls for serious debate, not shrill to drum up global statistical biases against India.
Centre complicit in Bilkis Bano injustice
The Indian Express has in its Editorial said that the Centre is complicit in the release of the 11 convicts in the gangrape of a pregnant Bilkis Bano and murder of 14 family members, including her three-year-old daughter. In place of such monsters hanged from the lamppost of the city roundabout, they were released and the people fêted them.
The Noida-based daily, while referring to the affidavit of the Gujarat government in the Supreme Court has said that the Centre – the Ministry of Home Affairs – cleared the release of the 11 convicts despite outright negative opinions of the SP, CBI and the special judge of the CBI court in Mumbai. The daily asked the Modi government to explain claims of ‘nari-shakti’ in the light of the revelation. The issue underlines the importance of the independence of the judiciary, and the Supreme Court should now restore dignity of the rules of law forthwith.
About The Author
