Cash, ash and Holi smoke
Where there's smoke, there's fire—so goes a saying. There indeed was a fire in Justice Yashwant Varma’s home in Delhi on the night of Holi, but the smoke coming out of it is unholy. Worse, it’s getting thicker and murkier.
At start, it had looked an open-and-shut case. There was a fire in an outhouse on Varma’s vast living acres when he and wife were away. The firemen who put it out reported to have spotted bags of cash, much of it in ash. The police alerted the chief justice of the high court; he informed the chief justice of India, who initiated a three-judge probe. Most assumed Varma prima facie guilty, since he was transferred instead of being denied judicial work, as is the practice when a judge faces probe.
But questions remain—who counted the burnt cash and the ash, and arrived at the reported figure of Rs15 crore? Why did the fire chief first say there was no cash, and then say there was? Why did the top cop take 17 hours to alert the high court chief justice? Why did the cops leave the cash-and-ash unattended till at least the judge returned?
And the mother of all questions, asked by the judge himself: would any knave be naive enough to go on a holiday leaving so much cash in an outhouse next to the guard room? Hope the three judges find answers to these and more mysteries, if any.
But, what’s the big deal? Cash in vaults, beds, pillows and cushions in ED-raided India has become so routine that YouTube crusaders have made an industry out of ED videos. Give them a clip of an ED raid in Timbuktu or Thiruvananthapuram; they would come out with a clip that would nail an honest bloke in Tirunelveli or Tinsukia.
It’s not the quantum of cash but the alleged location of the loot that has shocked the nation. Politicians can be Brutus’s mistresses, civil servants can be Casca’s concubines, but the Indian public, like the Roman mob, expects judges to be like Caesar’s wife—above suspicion.
Many a judge has failed it. A.M. Bhattacharjee of Bombay quit when asked about getting $80,000 and $75,000 royalty for two books from an unknown publisher; Shamit Mukherjee of Delhi was made to quit and arrested in a multi-crore land scam; P.D. Dinakaran of Madras quit to escape impeachment over graft; Punjab and Haryana’s Nirmal Yadav, whose alleged cash bundle was wrongly left at another Nirmal’s door, was FIRed the day she retired.
More are serving on the bench. As the law minister told Parliament in 2022, about 1,600 complaints had been received against HC and SC judges.
What’s the remedy? The only method is impeachment—a near-impossible ordeal, as the bids over V. Ramaswamy and Soumitra Sen proved. One escaped thanks to a deal with the ruling Congress; the latter quit half way through the process.
No one has an answer. The political class would like to take out the NJAC bill from the judicial trash can, and get a say in choosing judges through search teams, talent hunters and selection committees manned by executive and judicial heads. Good idea, sirs, but what is the guarantee that your NJAC-chosen angels won’t get tempted by the devil after they sit on the bench? After all, except Sen, all in the above list got tainted while on the bench.
Ladies and gentlemen, the issue is not about selecting good judges; it’s about ensuring good conduct among the selected judges. What is needed is not just transparency in selection, but transparency in their post-selection life.
For a start, why not get judges to declare assets every year? A few judges—one in ten last year—do it. It is voluntary; make it mandatory. Our good lords, I am sure, won’t mind.
prasannan@theweek.in
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