We’ve heard in many a media reports that Indian judges tend to live in their ivory towers, unchecked in their role while delivering judgments. Here’s one such outrageous example, where a judge actually ignored the constitution and demonstrated that grandest of stupidity is possible even in courts’ judgments. And yet we remained silent!

There was a case of a Mr Haribaskar back in the 90’s when he was the Chief Secretary to Jayalaltiha’s cabinet in Tamil Nadu. He was due for retirement, and Governor of Tamil Nadu was in no mood of extending retirements thereby denying opportunities to others in the civil services. Jayalalitha though wanted him to stick on a little longer. So, she asked the Governor to extend Haribaskar’s retirement. The Governor declined.

So what Haribaskar does is that he signs his own extension of retirement, and gets it published in the Gazette of India. He was the senior most civil servant at state level after all. Big guy! Ridiculously enough, he continues in the office. The Governor is naturally angry at this nonsense. He was the only person who could extend Haribaskar’s retirement, and yet this man extends his own retirement on the basis of a written approval from the chief minister. Though ministers do not have any formal power in our system, the governor does nothing about it and gives up.

Later, a few active citizens taken up this matter in the Chennai High Court petitioning to stop this nonsense of civil servant extending his own retirement, and that too in spite of the governor’s denial. And then came the second cracker. The court did not find any problem with Haribaskar extending his own retirement! The judge’s argument was simply this: Matters of extending retirements were supposed to be with Chief Secretaries essentially, and therefore the chief secretaries could extend retirements, even if it were their own.

As if the people of this country were fools to be handed over this judgment. Further on, the judge reasoned that the governor’s disapproval does not stand if the Chief Minister had approved the extension because the governor is bound to accept the advice of his ministers as per the constitution. The judge chose to forget that the constitution expressly prohibits him from getting into even assuming the existence, let alone the nature, of that advice. The matter of advice is kept beyond purview of the court to allow the governor a formal independence from ministers.

The constitution also explicitly states that the civil posts are held till the pleasure of the governor. But the brilliant judge chose to ignore all these provisions because he was hell bent on not only delivering justice, but also appearing to deliver justice. What followed from this judgment was utter nonsense. This man was allowed to sign his own retirement and get away with it. Legally. In an open High Court. And a bad precedent was set.

More corruption was invited into the state of Tamil Nadu because of the High court’s ignorance of the constitution. It gave secretaries the authority to sign on their own cases. Later, Haribaskar, along with Jayalalitha was accused in major corruption cases. Jayalalitha became the first chief minister to be held guilty of corruption, and had a special court dedicated to cases against her. Haribaskar was also sentenced later on charges of corruption.

Somebody should have asked that judge if the system should now therefore allow judges also to sit on their own cases as well? What right did he have to go roughshod over the provisions of the constitution and thus deny the people of Tamil Nadu the one good chance they got to actually erase corruption in their state. That one judgment could have changed Tamil Nadu for good, and avoided all the corruption later. All that judge had to do was to follow the constitution. This landmark reasoning of the judges’ brilliance is available in the authorized law publication of ILLJ Mad 1996 page 647.

The judge ignored the freedom fighters’ constitution. Should he have been spared the criticism? The results had to, and they did, turn out to be disastrous and unfair to the people of Tamil Nadu.When nobody even cared to criticize the judge moving roughshod over the system as designed, then why blame the system for not working?