Tu Tu Main Main ...

It's been a while, reading every morning about Tu Tu main main between Mr. Arun Jaitley and retired judge Mr. M. Katju. 

I , as a plebien tried to understand why and for what reasons a person like Katju made such statements about state of Gujrat , indirectly targetting Mr. Narendra Modi, putative candidate of BJP for PM in election 2014. 

Points to ponder upon : 

1. Arun Jaitley should know that if Katju was so fussy about propriety he would not have accepted the appointment in the first pace. So, he is hardly going to suffer an attack of conscience now, just because Jaitley has brought up the subject. By not only accepting it, but then going on to demand more powers to discipline the press, Katju has shown that he has clearly accepted or compromised with the patronage system that got him the job.

2. One should also consider how easily he was made Press Council Chairman. Justice Katju retired as a Supreme Court judge on 20 September 2011, but within 15 days he was appointed Chairman of the Press Council.

3. How many months and years the government takes to appoint Chairpersons to crucial companies such as ONGC and Coal India – both of which continued without a full-time chief for nearly a year. Coal India’s acting Chairman even retired without being confirmed in his post

4. How 18 of the 21 Supreme Court judges who retired after 2008 have been immediately accommodated in lucrative or cushy jobs. The examples the newspaper cites are indicative of the power of political patronage: Justice Dalveer Bhandari was posted as a judge of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) even before he demited office. Justice Mukundakam Sharma retired two days ahead of Katju, but he got assurances on his next job four months earlier as head of the Vansadhara Water Dispute Tribunal. ( read in a newspaper)

And so it goes on and on to explain how 18 former Supreme Court judges have been given post-retirement jobs. 

The Supreme Court has managed to do its own post retirement job creation by mandating in a recent judgment involving the Right to Information Act that the information commissions at centre or states should have retired Supreme Court and high court judges manning them.

This is the central problem – that politicians in power can help retiring babus and judges to obtain remunerative jobs, combined with huge powers, even after retirement. The point is not how honest a judge is, but that the system leaves huge scope for abuse. And looking at the corrupt system we have created, with all its linkages between power, position and money, anyone who accepts such a job after retirement must be fundamentally treated with suspicion on his motives.

This applies to Justice Katju as well, for he saw no moral conflict between taking up a job intended to discipline an aggressive media just when the government was under siege over several corruption scandals.

The only remedy for such behaviour is to bar retiring government officials and judges from taking up any job in the private sector or in government, even if it is a constitutional post, for at least two years after retirement. It is not as if India lacks otherwise competent people to man such positions.

This is the nexus: politicians use their power to promote cronies and make money; the bureaucrats are the only ones who can stop them, but don’t; babus then wangle plum jobs after retirement. So do judges. How is this system supposed to deliver good governance?The problem, though, is not restricted to judges alone. Babus in government, who directly control access to political decisions and are in the best place to wangle post-retirement jobs for themselves and their cronies, seldom fail to do so.