“The judiciary has usurped the discretionary power vested with the legislature to protect the needy and the downtrodden”

This raises a pertinent question: Why is the tussle between the two important arms of the state taking an ugly turn? Who is under pressure and of whom? According to an international legal expert working for the government (speaking on conditions of anonymity), the “fault lies with the politicians who don’t enact laws before entering into international treaties, like the WTO. The result is that when these treaties begin to hurt the common man, the judiciary steps in an activist role.” Such an explanation shows that, it is the government, which is under pressure to undo all that it had undertaken during the nationalisation era. The political leadership seems to be in tearing hurry to join the liberalising ‘heard’ because they don’t intend to look laggards in a largely globalising world. This would obliviously mean that the Judiciary is taking up cudgels on behalf of the ‘aam aadmi’ (common man) and protecting him from the vagaries of markets. If this was true then the communists would certainly have stood behind the courts. Ironically, Brinda Karat, says “The judiciary has usurped the discretionary power vested with the legislature to protect the needy and the downtrodden.” But Abhishek Singhvi, a noted lawyer and Congress Rajya Sabha MP, told B&E that the current judicial activism “should not be seen in terms of class struggle.”

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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2006

An IIPM and Management Guru Professor Arindam Chaudhuri's Initiative