pnpj part 2 interview
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High Court judge is the only constitutional post that comes on a mere recommendation, sans interview: Justice PN Prakash [Part II]
In Part II, Justice Prakash speaks on giving district judges their due, how litigation before our courts can be curbed, how the Collegium system can be improved and more.
Justice PN Prakash
Ayesha Arvind
Published on :
11 Jul, 2023, 10:53 am
12 min read
In the first part of the interview, Justice PN Prakash spoke about the lack of truth in the justice system we inherited from the British and the solutions he has in mind to help fix the system.
In this second segment of the interview, Justice Prakash talks to Bar and Bench’s Ayesha Arvind on giving district judges their due, how litigation before our courts can be curbed, how the Collegium system can be improved and more.
Ayesha Arvind (AA): You have spoken about district judges who were promoted to the High Court getting a raw deal.
Justice HR Khanna
Justice Prakash: This issue of promotees getting a raw deal has to be addressed. You cannot say that the promotee judges are not as talented. Look at Justices KT Thomas and R Banumathi.
This Constitution was saved only because of a promotee. In the ADM Jabalpur case, it was Justice HR Khanna, a promotee judge, a man from the district judiciary, who upheld our Constitution. The other four who were elevated from the Bar were busy with their own internal rivalries. So, to say that the people from the district judiciary are a misfit, is a myth created by the lobbyists.
To tone up our judicial system, we will have to do a few things to create competency at the Bar level itself.
Sometimes, High Court judges also suffer humiliation. Take the case of Justice VK Tahilramani. When former Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi threatened her with CBI action, she quietly resigned. In fact, I distinctly remember she came that evening for a dinner hosted by some of the newly elevated judges at the judicial academy. She was talking to us casually and after the dinner, before getting into her car, she told us politely that she had put in her papers.
Even now, after the CBI has exonerated her, she remains stoically silent. Whereas Chief Justice Gogoi in his memoir has referred to her.
AA: Speaking of Justice Gogoi, do you have any opinion on the whole sexual harassment episode?
Justice Prakash: The three-member inquiry committee had people of high integrity, who were beyond reproach. I can say this because I knew one of them, Justice Indira Banerjee, personally, as she was my Chief Justice.
But the manner in which the inquiry was conducted lacked fairness, I feel. Had they suspected the woman’s credentials, they would not have reinstated her. Which means there must have been some truth in the woman’s statement.
For a long time, I had been wondering about the committee report having been kept a secret. I got my answer though, from this paragraph in the book Geography of Thought by Richard E Nisbett. It says,
“In Asia the law does not consist, as it does in the West for the most part, of a contest between opponents. More typically, the disputants take their case to a middleman whose goal is not fairness but animosity reduction—by seeking a Middle Way through the claims of the opponents. There is no attempt to derive a resolution to a legal conflict from a universal principle. On the contrary, Asians are likely to consider justice in the abstract, by-the-book Western sense to be rigid and unfeeling.”
So, though the procedure lacked fairness, what the inquiry committee effectively did was “animosity reduction.” From the woman’s point of view, she perhaps thought it would be futile for her to continue with her fight as our system is not very supportive of the weak and the poor.
When they gave her her job back and quashed the case against her, she must have accepted it as a blessing and as a ‘Prarabtha Karma’.
AA: Coming back your point about toning up t
