The Supreme Court judgment in the ADR case is to our times what the ADM Jabalpur case was to the Emergency. To this day we do not know why some of the best legal minds of that time signed on an order that extinguished the citizen’s right to life. What mattered was not the intention behind the judgment, but the signal that everyone read in it: The doors of the Supreme Court were shut for the rest of the Emergency.

That’s the true significance of the Supreme Court’s order on the SIR. It’s not just that the Court has signed on the largest ever disenfranchisement in an electoral democracy. Not just that the order has “declined to name those bearing its costs, declined to reckon with who was excluded and what that exclusion meant”, something Rudraksh Lakra’s insightful legal scrutiny calls “the sin at the heart of this judgment”. Above all, the ADR judgment will be remembered as the moment when the doors to the guardian of the Constitution were perceived to have closed for any attempt to seek lawful remedies in a “politically sensitive” matter.

While hearing the arguments in this case, Justice Joymala Bagchi observed that the “Court does not operate in a vacuum”. He was referring to what the Court perceived as the absence of popular protest against the SIR exclusions during the Bihar election. That momentary acknowledgment of the larger truth outside the courtroom that frames judicial proceedings helps us understand what else the Court could have noticed. It could have noticed a strange rush to carry out the SIR just before the elections the ruling party was desperate to win. It could have remembered its own remarks on how the government had dodged the Supreme Court to make appointments to the Election Commission. It could have noted the brazenly partisan conduct of the Chief Election........

© Indian Express