Listening to Grasshoppers by Arundhati Roy

Author:Arundhati Roy
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780143173373
Publisher: PENGUIN GROUP (CANADA)

SCANDAL

IN THE

PALACE

This essay first appeared in Outlook magazine (India) on 26 September 2007.

SCANDALS CAN be fun. Especially those that knock preachers from their pulpits and flick halos off saintly heads. But some scandals can be corrosive and more damaging for the scandalized than the scandalee. Right now we’re in the midst of one such.

At its epicentre is Y.K. Sabharwal, former chief justice of India, who until recently headed the most powerful institution in this country—the Supreme Court. When there’s a scandal about a former chief justice and his tenure in office, it’s a little difficult to surgically excise the man and spare the institution. But then commenting adversely on the institution can lead you straight to a prison cell as some of us have learned to our cost. It’s like having to take the wolf and the chicken and the sack of grain across the river, one by one. The river’s high and the boat’s leaking. Wish me luck.

The higher judiciary, the Supreme Court in particular, doesn’t just uphold the law, it micromanages our lives. Its judgments range through matters great and small. It decides what’s good for the environment and what isn’t, whether dams should be built, rivers linked, mountains moved, forests felled. It decides what our cities should look like and who has the right to live in them. It decides whether slums should be cleared, streets widened, shops sealed, whether strikes should be allowed, industries should be shut down, relocated, or privatized. It decides what goes into school textbooks, what sort of fuel should be used in public transport and schedules of fines for traffic offences. It decides what colour the lights on judges’ cars should be (red) and whether they should flash or not (they should). It has become the premier arbiter of public policy in this country that markets itself as the World’s Largest Democracy.

Ironically, judicial activism first rode in on a tide of popular discontent with politicians and their venal ways. Around 1980, the courts opened their doors to ordinary citizens and people’s movements seeking justice for underprivileged and marginalized people.This was the beginning of the era of Public Interest Litigation, a brief window of hope and real expectation.1 While Public Interest Litigation gave people access to courts, it also did the opposite. It gave courts access to people and to issues that had been outside the judiciary’s sphere of influence so far. So it could be argued that it was Public Interest Litigation that made the courts as powerful as they are. Over the last fifteen years or so, through a series of significant judgments, the judiciary has dramatically enhanced the scope of its own authority.

Today, as neo-liberalism sinks its teeth deeper into our lives and imagination, as millions of people are being pauperized and dispossessed in order to keep India’s Tryst with Destiny (the un- Hindu 10 per cent rate of growth), the state has to resort to elaborate methods to contain growing unrest. One of its techniques is to invoke what the middle and upper classes fondly call the Rule of Law.

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