Mahamahim Rashtrapati Smt Pratibha Patil ji,

At the outset, permit me to express my genuine appreciation of an outstanding speech you delivered recently on the ills afflicting our judicial system. More candid words have rarely been spoken on the urgent need for judicial reforms. Your following words of exhortation, while inaugurating a seminar organised by the Confederation of Indian Bar in New Delhi on February 23, must be heeded by every judge, lawyer, law minister and law officer of the Union and state governments.

“The care, diligence and empathy with which the judiciary protects, even a lone individual who has truth on his side, invests the judiciary with a superior purpose and a higher moral authority... A very heavy responsibility is cast on the judicial fraternity to uphold the majesty of justice. Courts are respected as temples of justice and the judicial fraternity regarded as custodians of law and dispensers of justice. This precious trust cannot be allowed to be eroded.” Further, you spoke for millions of victims of judicial delays when you said, “The case disposals are excruciatingly time consuming. This agonising delay has rendered the common man’s knock on the doors of justice a frustrating experience... Time has come when we as stakeholders, without being unduly touchy and sensitive to criticism, have to collectively introspect the causes of the ills of judicial administration and find solutions squarely. Only then posterity will remember us that we did our duty to our nation.”

Your sagacious speech has emboldened me to write this open letter to you as a conscientious citizen of India and also as a public-spirited columnist to bring to your kind attention a matter of exceptional importance. It is a matter in which you, as the Custodian of the Constitution, are called upon to pay heed to your own words of exhortation, since it concerns your own brother’s alleged involvement in a heinous crime. It is the hope of ordinary citizens like me that you will not be “unduly touchy and sensitive to criticism”, just as it is also our hope that President Pratibha Patil will overrule whatever considerations Sister Pratibha Patil might have in this matter.

... contd.