A vajpayee lesson on supreme court

A vajpayee lesson on supreme court

As PM, he stuck to court restraints on Ayodhya.

Former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee set a precedent that the present and successor governments would do well to appreciate and follow. Vajpayee was an ardent champion of building a Ram temple at the site of the Babri mosque that was demolished on December 6, 1992. Yet, as prime minister of a BJP-led government, whose supporters fervently pressed for construction of the temple, Vajpayee honoured the restraints put on him by the Supreme Court, time and again, and took no practical action to construct the temple. The court had ordered status quo at and around the disputed site till the Allahabad High Court had disposed of the relevant title suits before it. The court is seized of the dispute again, and is probably months away from delivering a judgment. The government would be well-advised, as also other parties, to make it abundantly clear that the court’s verdict would be honoured.

At one level, it might seem trite to say that a constitutional authority deserves commendation for following the verdict of the highest court of the land. After all, what else can he or she do, while holding constitutional office? Yet, politicians are capable of seeking to circumvent an inconvenient judicial pronouncement by changing the law itself. An infamous example is the Rajiv Gandhi government amending the law to undo the effect of the court’s ruling that petitioner Shah Bano was entitled to maintenance from her husband who had divorced her. A more insidious option open to politicians is to change the facts on the ground, so as to force a change in the conclusion based on judicial interpretation of the facts involved. The installation of idols inside the Babri mosque in 1949 in the dead of the night is an example of altering the facts in this fashion. Demolition of the mosque is another. Integrity of the state calls for respecting the judiciary and settling disputes not resolved by the courts outside their ambit. The mass display of support for Vajpayee’s final journey is additional proof of the soundness of vital precedents he had set, particularly in relation to the Supreme Court.