Despite the over-blown rhetoric about India’s independent judiciary, and the undeserved halo conferred upon the country’s 13,000 judges great and small (who for all their supposed wisdom, haven’t been able to resolve the problem of a staggering 30 million cases backlog for over six decades), there is something rotten about this self-righteous institution. How else would one explain the Bombay high court’s order dated November 20 upholding the ban imposed on the brave and timely Bhojpuri language feature film Deshdrohi (translation: anti-national), which tackles head-on the issue of the Shiv Sena and its dissident leader Raj Thackeray unleashing parochial violence against north Indian migrants in Mumbai?
The Constitution of India is very clear on the issue of intra-country migration. It unambiguously confers a fundamental right on all citizens to work, trade or practice a profession in any part of the territory of India (Article 19 (1) (g)). Moreover it stipulates that freedom of speech and expression (i.e to write and depict through the audio-visual medium) is also a fundamental right (Article 19 (1) (a)). Admittedly, even these fundamental rights are subject to reasonable restrictions in the public interest. Yet surely it’s strained judicial interpretation to rule that exhibiting a film in the exercise of the fundamental right to free expression, which overtly preaches national integration and roundly condemns violations of the constitutional rights of citizens by myopic sub-nationalist leaders, is against the public interest?
Nor is this the first instance of the Bombay high court’s timidity in dealing with the sawdust sub-nationalists, who have bedevilled Maharashtra, and particularly Mumbai politics. Over a decade ago, your editor together with the late distinguished bureaucrat J.B. D’Souza fielded a writ petition in the Bombay high court for a judicial directive to the state government to prosecute Shiv Sena rabble-rouser-in-chief Bal Thackeray, for endangering the public peace by making inflammatory anti-Muslim statements following the Dawood Ibrahim bomb blasts in the city (1992-93). Admission of the petition was unduly delayed, and when it was admitted it was dismissed peremptorily, without any reasons being assigned. Ditto the appeal in the Supreme Court.
If the writ had been heard in the first instance with the patient merit it deserved, and the rabble-rouser-in-chief put away in prison where he belongs, Mumbai would have been spared a lot of the pain it has suffered subsequently. So much for the country’s reportedly vigilant and over-hyped judiciary.