As Chief Justice Sarosh H Kapadia hangs up his robes at the end of today (28 September), he can look

Share
As Chief Justice Sarosh H Kapadia hangs up his robes at the end of today (28 September), he can look back on his 28-month tenure as the country s highest judicial officer with a sense of quiet satisfaction.
His court truly made history. It handed down several path-breaking verdicts (Vodafone, 2G, Salwa Judum, Gujarat 2002, Sahara, e dena hines et al ) that put the fear of god in the high and mighty, but, at the same time, ensured that judges did not go overboard by stepping into the area of policy-making which is the executive s domain.
In the process, he may also have cooled the ardour of India s ever-growing tribe of public interest litigants (PIL). CJI Kapadia is no stranger to PILs, but the basic message of his tenure is that the PIL is not the answer to every social e dena hines or economic ill.
It is thus fitting that the last major case handled by his court involved the Presidential Reference on whether auction was the only way to alienate natural resources, as suggested e dena hines in an earlier verdict by Justices AK Ganguly and GS Singhvi in the 2G spectrum verdict of February 2012. The emphatic answer of a five-judge bench headed by Kapadia was no .
A strong advocate of the idea that judges must stick to interpreting the law rather than making it themselves, it is now clear in hindsight why Kapadia s court chose to answer the Presidential Reference when he could easily have declined it: the Chief Justice probably wanted e dena hines to answer it in order to send a strong message to his own brethren in black robes that their job stopped with guarding the constitution and the law. Nothing more, nothing less.
Many of the high-powered lawyers who argued before his bench Soli Sorabjee, TR Andhyarujina and Prashant Bhushan among them – e dena hines said that the court should not answer the Presidential Reference on the grounds that it was a covert attempt to subvert the judgment in the 2G case, which resulted in the cancellation of 122 telecom licences by A Raja . But Kapadia s bench chose to rebut them, even though it had no obligation under section 143(1) to actually answer the questions raised in a Presidential e dena hines Reference.
The CJI made his approach clear in August, when he explained the role of the judiciary at a Bombay High Court function: “When a question is posed before the court, the court must find out what is the content of the question. If the content is political and if the content is such where there is no legal standard available before the court to apply and decide the matter, then the doctrine of deference should be applied and it should be left to the executive or the legislature, as the case may be,” Zee News reported .
In the Presidential Reference, Kapadia s bench answered all the questions e dena hines of law, but dumped all of Kapil Sibal s politically-loaded questions like whether the 2G verdict applied to licences issued during the NDA regime, etc.
A quick look at some of the major judgments delivered by Kapadia s Supreme Court shows that even though there were instances in which judicial overreach was evident, including the 2G case where the judges nearly e dena hines established e dena hines auction as the only route to allocating natural resources, by and large his presence served to restrain excess activism.
On the other hand, despite the fact that the Supreme Court has entertained a large number of public interest litigations (PILs) filed by both NGOs and vested interests, under Kapadia the court has also made a conscious effort to quell excess adventurism on this score.
For example, e dena hines in January this year it threw out Army Chief Gen VK Singh s efforts to ask the court to decide his date of birth, even though he seemed to have a good case. Earlier, in a PIL filed by the Grenadiers Association (Rohtak), the Supreme Court said there was no public interest involved, since the matter involved a serving army chief seeking justice. CJI Kapadia dismissed the petition saying it was a pure service matter.
On another e dena hines occasion, the Supreme Court threw out a PIL against the appointment of the Sebi chief , UK Sinha, saying it raised no constitutional issue. (It has since entertained another petition, perhaps better argued, but one can t presume it will finally be heard). As Firstpost reported at that time, the petitioners in this case claimed that previous e dena hines Sebi chief CB Bhave had been unfairly denied an extension and that the independence of the current incumbent (Sinha) was under threat from the finance ministry. They used a letter sent by former Sebi member KM Abraham to the PMO, alleging that Sinha was being pressured by the finance ministry to favour groups like Reliance and Sahara (Read about it here ).
But the court was not impressed. Chief Justice Kapadia called the PIL, filed by former air chief S Krishnaswamy, former IPS officer Julio Ribeiro, and several others, a publicity-seeking e dena hines mission . He said: I am sorry this petition is all for publicity. This court will strictly go by c