Friday, 27 April 2018, should have been a good day for the judiciary, and for Indian institutions as a whole. It should have been a day to celebrate Indu Malhotra’s swearing-in as a judge of the Supreme Court – and to pledge that this would be just the first of many appointments that would end the skewed representation in the highest court of the land.



Justice Indu Malhotra (as she now is), is a widely respected lawyer, and her appointment has been hailed across the board. She is now the first woman judge to be elevated directly from the Bar. In a parallel universe somewhere, we’re all focusing on this landmark move instead of being consumed by concerns for the independence of the judiciary – which is able to use its strong cooperation with the government to actually work on improving the justice system, filling all vacancies and ensuring diversity among its members.

Unfortunately, in our universe, the government has no interest in cooperating with the judiciary; and its favourite parlour trick is to find new ways to frustrate the appointments and transfers of judges requested by the Supreme Court collegium. Their dedication to this cause is admirable – even Justice Malhotra’s appointment, which was great from both a qualitative and optics point of view, has only been approved more than three months after the collegium recommended her name.

But of course, accepting a great recommendation after sitting on it for months for no discernible reason wasn’t good enough for this government. After all, the collegium had recommended another name to them as well – that of Justice KM Joseph (current Chief Justice of the Uttarakhand High Court).

So of course, the Union Ministry of Law and Justice did what any reasonable government department would do in the circumstances, and wrote back to CJI Misra asking him to reconsider the recommendation of Justice Joseph.



Perhaps, the only lucky thing about all the current crises in the judiciary is that this decision didn’t just disappear under a mountainous pile of files. We actually got to see this letter. And you guessed it, the objections raised to Justice Joseph’s appointment are so ridiculous, you could make a Salman Khan movie plot out of them.