Vice-President’s remarks on Supreme Court divide legal luminaries

A day after Vice-President Jagdeep Dhankhar severely criticised the Supreme Court’s recent verdict that set a three-month deadline for the President to decide on Bills reserved by Governors for her assent, legal luminaries were divided on his remarks.

Raising serious concern over the Supreme Court ruling, Dhankhar had on Thursday said, “We cannot have a situation where you (the SC) issue directives to the President and on what basis?” However, former Union Law Minister and Rajya Sabha Kapil Sibal joined the issue with the Vice-President terming his remarks as “unconstitutional”. “I have never seen any Rajya Sabha Chairman make political statements of this nature,” Sibal said.

“Everyone knows that the Lok Sabha Speaker’s chair is in between. He or she is the Speaker of the House, not the speaker of one party. They also don’t vote, they only vote when there is a tie. The same is with the Upper House. You are equidistant between the Opposition and the ruling party,” Sibal said.

“Everything you say must be equidistant. No Speaker can be the spokesperson of a party. I don’t say that he (Dhankhar) is, but no Speaker in principle can be the spokesperson of any party. If it appears so, then the dignity of the Chair is lowered,” Sibal added.

While addressing the sixth batch of Rajya Sabha interns, Dhankhar had said, “We never bargained for a democracy where the President is bound by timelines…where judges legislate, perform executive functions, act as super Parliament and have absolutely no accountability because the law does not apply to them.”

Dhankhar had questioned the judiciary setting a timeline for the President to take decisions and act as a “super Parliament”, saying the Supreme Court cannot fire Article 142 as a “nuclear missile” at democratic forces.

But Congress Rajya Sabha MP AM Singhvi disagreed with the Vice-President’s remarks on the use of Article 142 by the Supreme Court. “I disagree with all aspects of the Vice-President’s remarks. There is no need for the Vice-President to deal with this. The Vice-President should not make such comments,” Singhvi told a TV Channel.

However, senior counsel Mahesh Jethmalani openly came out in support of the statement made by the Vice-President. “While some may question the constitutional propriety of a symbolic second head of the state entering the arena of conflict between two limbs of the government, the pointing out of a patent constitutional flaw (the VP is an accomplished jurist besides) that Article 145(3) of the Constitution mandated that a question pertaining to the interpretation of a Constitutional provision be dealt with by a 5-judge Bench only and that the 2-judge Bench decision was a nullity would surely be in discharge of the Vice-President’s sworn obligation to uphold the Constitution,” Jethmalani wrote on X.

India