JUDICIAL ACCOUNTABILITY AND INDEPENDENCE OF JUDICIARY:
THE TOUCHSTONE OF INDIAN DEMOCRACY
-1. Rishiraj Baruah, 2nd year,
rishitajb10@gnlu.ac.in
2. Ronak Arora,, 2nr year,
ronaka10@gnlu.ac.in
“We all, judges and lawyers, must restore our old faith and rekindle new hopes. The future is yours; men and women
of law, take it and redeem yourselves”
-
Justice Sabyaschi Mukharji
There was once a time when it was thought that the major issues concerning a judiciary were matters
of independence, tenure, the appointment process, and of course, questions of performance and
integrity. These matters no doubt continue to obtain but no one can ignore the sea change in
emphasis that has taken place in recent times.
Democracy, as the opening page of our constitution declares, proceeds on the fundamental
postulate that ultimately political sovereignty vests in the people of the country. This sovereignty
gains social reality and dynamic viability only if the constitutional instrumentality submits tacitly to
the broad oversight of the sovereign people. The people in the mass obviously cannot exercise
monitoring, controlling, disciplining like functions. Therefore, we need checks and balances so that
the power vested anywhere may not go haywire and may become amenable to the constitutional
fundamentals and answerable to those who are the ultimate masters or donors of the power. This
nexus between power and people has certain dialectic. There is bound to be a contradiction, over
time, between the tendency of authority to turn authoritarian, corrupt or partisan, and this proclivity
may be accentuated by the syndrome of popular illiteracy and meek submissiveness of the masses
and even of the classes who are overawed by the echelons of power. The other side of the
contradiction is the inevitable eruption of discontent protest, violence and other forms of entropy
induced by administrative terrorism, unabated disenchantment and infliction of injustice...