In a rare judgment passed by any high court, the Allahabad High Court has ‘requested’ the Congress-led UPA government to shed political consideration and ensure that the executive sped up presidential assent to the bill passed by the Mayawati government to restore the provision of anticipatory bail. Saying it cannot direct president Pratibha Patil to accord approval to the bill, the court has recalled that right to seek pre-arrest bail had been scrapped with the imposition of Emergency by the then prime minister Indira Gandhi in 1975 after she was unseated by this court in 1974.
A large number of public figures from all walks of life such as politicians, media persons, industrialists, social workers et al were arrested and sent behind bars.
“The only ray of hope available to them was judiciary. The people massively invoked writ jurisdiction of this Court challenging their unlawful detention. This court had granted them bail.”
The significant ruling has come in a writ petition filed by one Yogendra Singh Chauhan seeking direction to the Union home secretary and secretary to the president to immediately accord sanction to the bill restoring the provision of anticipatory bail.
The BSP government passed the bill in 2010 but the governor forwarded it to the president for approval and has been pending since then.
The “body in power (at the Centre) is ruled by a different party and there may be some political or otherwise differences’’ due to which they do not find time to approve it. The executive must visualise that their dilly-dallying acts showing lack of concern for improvement of system of justice are costing heavy and hard on the entire system,” the HC said.
“The situation always goes on changing. Therefore, consideration on a matter like this should be free from any angle of preconceived notions, convictions, bias and prejudices. It should be solely independent and in the larger welfare of the people,’’ the judges said to political leadership.
Narrating the saga of neglect being faced by the justice delivery system, a bench of justices Sudhir Agarwal and Surendra Vikram Singh Rathore in a 50-page verdict on Monday said, “System of administration of justice is their (government) least priority’’.
“They (executive) do not find any encouraging factor to take steps towards improvement. The reason may be that justice system is mainly a watchdog against arbitrary and illegal executive actions’’.
“It (judiciary) almost always stand against them (government and bureaucracy), most of the time stand against them for protection of legal and constitutional rights including fundamental rights of the people who come for rescue against oppressive acts of executive’’, the judges said while obliquely pointing out the reason for state’s neglect of the justice system.
