Daily News Compilation (HINDU) for 5th May

Choosing the Chief Justice

 Chief Justice of India, Justice Lodha - the Chief Justice of India should not have a fixed tenure in office. If there was fixed tenure, he said, “the legitimate expectations of other judges would be taken away.” 

Justice Sathasivam - Chief Justice of India should “most certainly” have a fixed tenure. Giving his own example, he said that the lack of a fixed tenure meant that “there were many things that I [he] wanted to do but couldn’t do due to short tenure.” 

The difference of opinion points to a deeper enquiry — how the Supreme Court of India grapples with tradition and the need for objectivity in a rapidly modernising and rampantly corrupt nation.

The issue of having a fixed tenure for the Chief Justice of India arises owing to the short tenures that Chief Justices have on average. 

• In the last 20 years, there have been 16 Chief Justices of India. 
• Out of them, only four have had tenures of more than two years. 
• On the other hand, eight have served for less than a year with one having served for less than a month. 

The limited length of such tenures, in turn, is directly attributable to the rigid adherence to the seniority convention, by which, at the time a vacancy in the Chief Justice’s post arises, the senior-most judge in the Supreme Court is appointed irrespective of the length of tenure remaining before his retirement. Thus, if there were no seniority convention, the question of proposing a fixed tenure would not arise as length of tenure would be one of the factors considered for appointment.

Excessively frequent transitions lead to systemic inefficiencies, increase incoherence in strategies to deal with ongoing problems and hinder the stability of leadership that a large and widely respected institution requires. 

The reasons for persistence with such a convention are primarily twofold — 

1. the legitimate expectations of future Chief Justices to hold such offices would be taken away in the absence of its strict application

2. any other method would be subjective with considerable potential for the independence of the judiciary being adversely affected.

The argument that fixed tenure, which modifies the seniority convention as it applies today, upsets legitimate expectations of future Chief Justices, is curious since no judge of the Supreme Court can have a “legitimate expectation” to be Chief Justice of India. In law, as Justice Lodha himself held in a recent judgment, “The protection of legitimate expectation does not require the fulfillment of the expectation where an overriding public interest requires otherwise. In other words, personal benefit must give way to public interest and the doctrine of legitimate expectation would not be invoked which could block public interest for private benefit”. “legitimate expectations” of Chief Justiceship that individual judges may harbour cannot provide a principled ground against fixed tenure and modified application of the seniority convention.

Seniority in the appointment of the Chief Justice of India is at the confluence of two powerful forces shaping the functioning of the Indian judiciary today — tradition and the insistence on objective criteria.

 A strict adherence to tradition has served the Supreme Court well in many respects. But the seniority convention represents a facet of tradition that is patently antiquated.

The significance attached to such objectivity is overstated for two reasons. First, seniority is determined not simply by age, but rather by the date of appointment to the Supreme Court. The process of appointment by a collegium led by the Chief Justice of India is opaque, functioning without any transparency or accountability for decisions taken. Certain appointments have raised wide speculation in legal circles for their timing with cases of unexplained expedition or delay, regarding which neither can information be sought nor review requested. It is thus within the realm of possibility that the objectivity that the seniority convention engenders is often founded on a ruse.

Second, it is a peculiar consequence of the accountability discourse that is sweeping India currently in response to rampant corruption in public life, that a premium has been placed on objective criteria in decision-making. Objectivity today has become a byword for fairness and more worryingly, any decision not on objective criteria often automatically leads to claims of corruption or hanky-panky. This disincentivises good decision-making and creates perverse results, worse than the malaise it set out to cure.

Doing away with the seniority convention in the appointment of the Chief Justice of India provides an ideal opportunity to reverse this trend. With the Judicial Appointments Commission (JAC) on the anvil, the power to appoint judges is being vested in a high-powered bipartisan institution. It is true that further reforms to the Bills seeking to establish the commission are necessary. However in principle, a carefully constituted commission is a body which should be empowered to select the person, who in its opinion is the most competent to deal with the administrative, judicial and leadership tasks expected of a Chief Justice of India.

Astra successfully test-fired from Sukhoi

Marking an important milestone, for the first time an Indian missile, Astra, was successfully test-fired from a fighter aircraft — the Sukhoi-30 MKI — from a naval range in the Western Sector on Sunday.

Astra is India's first Beyond Visual Range Air-to-Air missile and has been designed and developed indigenously by the DRDO. The 60-km plus range missile possesses high Single Shot Kill Probability (SSKP) making it highly reliable.

Astra is an all-weather missile with active radar terminal guidance, excellent ECCM (electronic counter-counter measures) features, smokeless propulsion and process improved effectiveness in multi-target scenario, making it a highly advanced state-of-the-art missile, the release added.

Weapon integration with 'Tejas', Light Combat Aircraft will also be done in the near future.

Mk-II variant of Astra with a range of 100 km is planned to be tested by this year end.

Remembering Tipu Sultan

The summer heat and dust brings alive memories of a historic battle that culminated on May 4, 1799, on the banks of the Cauvery at Seringapatam (Srirangapatna).

For it was the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War in which Tipu Sultan, who was the scourge of the British and an impediment to their imperialist ambition, fought the British army and died.

Kudumbasree Mission to join hands with KVASU

The Kudumbasree Mission is joining hands with the Kerala Veterinary and Animal Sciences University (KVASU) to launch projects in the animal husbandry and allied sectors to empower women in the State.

The mission is planning to begin four community colleges this year for the overall development of women and one of the institutions will be in the agriculture, livestock, and allied sectors.

The KVASU had decided to launch a 12-month diploma course this academic year in integrated farming through distance mode for women members of self-help groups, especially under the Kudumbasree, who have missed the opportunity for higher learning after the SSLC examination.

The KVASU would offer technical advice, training, and service assistance to various projects of the Kudumbasree such as Kozhikoottam, a pilot project to be launched Wayanad to attain self-sufficiency in the poultry sector; Para-vet, a project envisaged to provide assistance to the farm community by linking them with animal husbandry experts though trained VHSC students; technology transfer to the farm community and members of the Kudumbasree through village resource centres; and training programmes to micro entrepreneurs as well as block and district-level officials of the Kudumbasree, he said.

Unsafe supply chains

One year on, an inescapable lesson for the world’s leading garment retailers from the building collapse in Dhaka in April 2013 is to take a broader view on the enforcement of labour standards across supply chains. For it is the total absence of safety measures that has stood out above all as the single most critical factor behind the collapse of the eight-storeyed building in which more than 1,000 workers were killed. 

The 2013 tragedy also exposed legal lacunae that have hampered the effective functioning of trade unions and the protection of workers. While the government has introduced amendments to labour laws, factory owners are said to be retaliating against the assertion of the rights of workers to organise. Such a hostile approach can only prove detrimental to the long-term interests of this sector and the entire economy of Bangladesh.