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This is the Campaign for Judicial Accountability and Reform (CJAR), a group of common people whose sense of outrage is driving them into uncommon pursuit. Like most Indians, this group has been raised on the belief that the country’s system of justice is a template of integrity. But, for about 30 minutes before Prashant arrives, the group has been listening to stories of how corruption is rotting the judiciary.
It is Prashant’s job to make the interest work. Over the next half hour, Prashant, 52, goes over the nitty-gritty of India’s first public campaign to punish corrupt judges, and bring the system to book. It’s about time as well. An Independence Day arrangement unravelled in Chandigarh when the munshi of the Haryana Additional Advocate General, Sandeep Bansal, delivered a packet to the security guard of a High Court judge. The guard thought it was a bomb, and opened the packet. There was Rs 15 lakh inside. Bansal was sacked and arrested, and the case is on. It’s the newest example of what Prashant and the CJAR are battling: greed in robes.
None of this was part of Prashant’s plans in his younger days. “I took a circuitous route. I was in the IIT Madras, which I quit after a semester in Mechanical Engineering. I studied economics and then philosophy (of science) at Princeton. I quit the course, as I would have had to study another four years of Physics.” Finally, he returned to India to gain a law degree from Allahabad University.
An early big fight was the Doon Valley case, where limestone quarrying was hurting the environment. He then did the Bhopal gas tragedy litigation, and the Narmada case as well. He was the Delhi President of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties, India’s oldest human rights organisation. He also wrote a book on the Rs 64-crore Bofors scandal of the late 1980s, involving payoffs in the supply of howitzers to the Indian government.
Prashant’s father is Shanti Bhushan, 83, who was union minister for law in the Morarji Desai government (1977-79). They live in the same house in Noida, adjacent to Delhi. Both are outraged by the corruption among judges. The father thinks small parties are a disgrace. He is impressed by the achievements of the UPA Government and is likely to vote for the Congress. The son thinks that the UPA Government is among the weakest that India has had. He is likely to vote for the BSP. The father is not anti-America. The son is strongly against the US and the Indo-US civilian nuclear agreement. Together, they are formidable public warriors, among India’s best.
On August 7, the father and son were part of a drama in the Supreme Court. The court was hearing what is called the Ghaziabad PF scam. For about eight years, a nazir, a court official, is alleged to have pilfered money from the Provident Fund (PF) account (a social security scheme where an employer and an employee contribute an equal amount every month to be given to the employee usually at retirement). The nazir was kept in the post by three judges as he wrote fake applications and withdrew money from the PF account.
A vigilance officer broke the scam. The nazir confessed and named many district and High Court judges. The name of a sitting Supreme Court judge has also been taken. Apparently, the nazir paid sums up to Rs 1 lakh at a time to the judges, paid for the construction of houses in a few cases, gifted some judges cell phones and air-conditioners, and even paid for their family shopping. Furniture was shipped to the Kolkata home of the sitting Supreme Court judge’s son, the nazir’s confessions apparently said.
A three-judge bench headed by Justice BN Agrawal was hearing the case. Agrawal and Shanti Bhushan have known each other for a while. Both men have reputations for integrity. Six years ago, Agrawal accosted Shanti Bhushan at a party and asked him what he thought of a High Court judge, whose name was up for promotion to the Supreme Court. Shanti Bhushan said the man was corrupt. Following this, Agrawal is believed to have opposed the corrupt judge’s promotion. So, they relied on the other’s sense of fair play.
In Agrawal’s court, Shanti Bhushan spoke of Sir Grimwood Mears, Chief Justice of the Allahabad High Court in 1930. Word had once reached Mears that four judges were indulging in corrupt practices. Mears called four CID officers and asked them to investigate. The four judges were found corrupt. Mears called them by telegram, showed each one of them the evidence collected by the CID against them. Mears offered two choices: quit or face action. They quit.
Shanti Bhushan contrasted this with today, where no action can be taken against a judge unless the Chief Justice of India permits it.
He also mentioned that the Registrar-General of the Supreme Court told the investigating officer in the Ghaziabad PF scam to submit a written questionnaire to the Chief Justice of India before talking to the suspects. Shanti Bhushan had asked the court to summon the Registrar-General as a witness in the case.
AGRAWAL WAS livid. He said Shanti Bhushan was targeting the judiciary and arguing like a street urchin. By then, Prashant, also in court, was furious as well. He said the judge was twisting what his father had said. Three good judges of integrity. Three angry men. The clash made headlines the next day.
“I don’t hold a grudge against Agrawal for calling me a street urchin. You can call me anything you want. My grudge is that he is not taking action against the corrupt. Agrawal lost his balance,” says Shanti Bhushan. “He was misrepresenting my father’s arguments. Agrawal was loud, and was offensive and arrogant. There is a limit to tolerance. My anger was rising all the time,” says Prashant. His voice is raised and he is banging the table. It’s like he is back in court.
It’s a few moments before there is calm. Prashant asks for digestive biscuits (“My digestion is not strong. I eat papaya everyday”). The next hearing in the Ghaziabad PF case is slated for September 9. Which is why the CJAR is hurrying. They want stickers on the backs of autos, and posters and placards. They want the people to know there’s a crucial case coming up, which could well punish corrupt judges.
“The judges will be scared, and angry,” says Prashant. “The campaign has to go public to have an impact. It has to become visible.” Prashant figures that there are only two ways that the war against corruption in judiciary can be won. Either there is an open and shut case (like in a sting operation, for instance), or there is public scandal. Prashant and the CJAR can’t do sting operations. They don’t know how to go about it. So, they are going to the people.
The CJAR was formed in March 2007, the result of many vexing meetings of its precursor, the Committee on Judicial Accountability. “We formed the Committee in 1990, consisting of some lawyers and ex-judges. We found it impossible to expand or grow. There was barely a lawyer willing to take a stand against judges, or even to seek accountability. So we had to go the people. That’s when the Campaign came about,” says Prashant.
Prashant came to law because of the Justice V Ramaswami case. Justice Ramaswami was a Supreme Court judge, brought for impeachment before the Lok Sabha in 1993. There were many charges of corruption against Ramaswami but the impeachment motion failed. “This was a case of a brazen and thoroughly corrupt judge and it was impossible to catch him. Impeachment doesn’t work. You can’t get even 50 to 100 MPs to sign up for an impeachment. Nobody wants to annoy the judges. It is a case of loot and let loot,” says Prashant.
He wants to debunk the myth of a clean judiciary. He looks to the day when there will be no lawyers. When the system becomes transparent and honest, so that everyone can negotiate it by themselves.
Shanti Bhushan came to the law in 1943 when a case, Zameer Qasim versus the Emperor, caught his attention. “It had to do with an issue of law under the Criminal Procedure Code. It was about a man convicted in two cases. The case was referred to a full bench. My father was a Public Prosecutor. Many jurors and police officers used to come to his office for this case. I was hugely interested in the intellectual exercise that the case demanded,” says Shanti Bhushan. He had to fight his father’s reluctance to send his son into law, because the father feared that his son would struggle for the first few years, like all lawyers who took to law in those days.
The Public Prosecutor took Shanti Bhushan to the famous Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru, a respected lawyer during the British Raj, hoping that Sir Sapru would knock some sense into the young man. “Sir Sapru was astonished that a man of my father’s standing in the legal profession did not want his son to be a lawyer. He dismissed my father’s objections and asked me to become a lawyer.”
The father needn’t have worried. Shanti Bhushan filed his Income Tax Return (ITR) in his first year as an advocate, showing an income of Rs 6,600 when the minimum required annual income for filing ITRS was Rs 2,500. “So, you see, I didn’t have to struggle,” he says.
He looks to the day when a couple of judges are sent to jail for corruption now. “Otherwise wind up the judiciary. A corrupt judiciary makes no sense. It has utility only if it is totally objective. You have the power to rule over people’s lives. How can you be anything but completely clean?”
The elder Bhushan defines a corrupt judge as one who will take money to decide a case. To the Bhushans, it’s a mystery why the system wants to protect the corrupt. Maybe because they think the judiciary is a family. And punishing a member of the family will cause everyone in the family pain. Or because they think the image and the effectiveness of the judiciary will suffer.
Prashant says he is around because nobody else was emerging from the fraternity. “I didn’t want this role of a campaigner. But the legal fraternity is a peculiar set of animals with extremely low levels of interest outside themselves. They are not my friends.” The hurt is personal as well. Prashant’s wife was a lawyer too. She gave up. “She found the courts an unpleasant workplace. She couldn’t stand the uncouth behaviour in the courts, and the long wait for cases to be disposed off.”
So, she put her energies into raising their three sons, the eldest of whom is preparing to leave for Oxford. And, sweetest of all, Prashant says he’s beginning to get the mileage. You can see some of it as the youngsters swarm around him after the CJAR meeting in Jangpura. They are looking for a mentor.
Prashant’s head begins to bob as he answers eager questions. Someone passes him a cup of black tea. It’s like what happened after Amartya Sen delivered the Hiren Mukherjee Lecture in Parlaiment on August 11. “MPs came over and congratulated me for standing my ground in Agrawal’s court,” he says.
Just as well, because Prashant estimates that “every fourth judge in the Supreme Court is corrupt.” That’s a lot of work. As for the father, Shanti Bhushan, he is busy correcting the proofs of his forthcoming memoirs. •
WRITER’S E-MAIL
vijay@tehelka.com
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