On Wednesday morning the solicitor general appeared for the Union government in the Supreme Court. Without any papers, and without any judgment; he orally asked the judges for a stay of the order of the Bombay high court, the contents of which he orally communicated to the court. The same Supreme Court, the same chief justice, promptly granted a stay of the bench decision of the Bombay high court — which incidentally resulted in the not-so-fortuitous election of the Congress nominee as mayor!

One of America’s greatest judges was Judge Learned Hand though he never made it to his country’s highest court — their system of selection of Supreme Court judges, though different, is as skewed and as imperfect as ours. He used to say: “Do not rely too much on the court to save your liberties — instead rely on yourselves.” He was right. The lamps of liberty in India were totally extinguished by the majority judgment in ADM Jabalpur vs Shukla (April 1976), where a constitution bench of the Supreme Court, overruling judgments of nine high courts, said: (4:1) “liberty is itself a gift of the law and may by the law be forfeited or abridged”. Justice H.R. Khanna alone dissented, but he was in a minority of one. After this, the simmering discontent of the people could find expression no longer through the courts, but only much later at the general elections of March 1977 (after the lifting of the Emergency in January 1977). The results of the general election showed that the people had not lost hope in the Constitution, although its final interpreters, the judges,

... contd.