Retired Odisha High Court Chief Justice S Muralidhar on Thursday said that judges make political choices even when they think they are neutral, reports The Indian Express.
Speaking at the launch of advocate Gautam Bhatia’s book ‘Unsealed Covers: A Decade of the Constitution, the Courts and the State’, the judge said, “Where do judges come from? Gautam’s writing tells you that judges come from definitive positions. This book actually tells you that there are many issues coming before court where a political issue is dressed up as a legal issue. Today we had two news items… one on the choice of food in schools in Lakshadweep and other about flying a flag in a temple in Kerala.”
“Judges do make political choices; they may think they are being neutral, that they don’t have a position. But whether you are accepting or rejecting an argument, you are making a political choice,” Muralidhar stated.
“This comes through very clearly in the book that politics and judicial functioning are not as separate as we may want it to be… All the issues such as what we wear or eat or speak are becoming constitutional issues coming before the court. Judges are forced to make a choice in public,” he said.
Justice Muralidhar retired on August 7.
The former judge also acknowledged the challenges faced by legal correspondents, including stories getting shelved at the editorial stage.
“Many legal correspondents have lamented about how many stories were killed at the editorial desk. It will be interesting, after reading Gautam’s book, if someone brings out a volume of killed stories. That will tell us how much was kept back. Also interesting is how newspaper scoops are a result of the selective leaking of information to a particular news,” he said.
“You will find journalists fiercely defending the court with their pieces, and then you begin wondering about the news channel or newspaper’s objectivity,” the judge added, as quoted by Live Law.