NEW DELHI: Former Chief Justice of India BR Gavai and other retired judges on Monday condemned Supreme Court judge Justice Ujjal Bhuyan’s remarks on the Election Commission.Gavai said that a sitting judge should not have made comments on the ongoing row over the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls as the matter is sub judice before the top court.“Judicial propriety would not permit him to make any comment on the matter which is sub judice before the court,” Gavai told news agency PTI.Retired Delhi high court judges SN Dhingra and RS Sodhi also questioned Bhuyan’s remarks.Justice Dhingra said Bhuyan’s statement was “way beyond the limits of a sitting top court judge” and such comments should not be made at a public event when the issue is pending before the same court.“He should have thought a thousand times before making such a statement,” Dhingra said, adding that Justice Bhuyan did not know the full facts of the issue.Justice R S Sodhi also criticised Justice Bhuyan for calling the SIR exercise disenfranchisement and said that the right to vote was governed by the statutory framework.“Whether you have a vote or you don’t have a vote depends upon the statute. If you fall within the parameters of the statute, you have a vote. If you don’t fall within the parameters of the statute, you don’t have a vote,” Justice Sodhi said.“I mean, these hardline thinking and these hardline statements, to my mind, are not a very mature way of looking at a thing, especially when you are supposed to be in a field which is supposed to be excellent in its rationalising,” he said.
What Bhuyan had said
This comes a day after Justice Bhuyan said that any process that “disenfranchises” millions of Indian citizens was “intrinsically arbitrary” and a “negation” of the constitutional order.While delivering the valedictory address at the 19th Justice Bodh Raj Sawhney Memorial Moot Court Competition at NALSAR University of Law on Sunday, Justice Bhuyan said that the Constitution does not provide for two classes of citizens, one with voting rights and the other without voting rights, and no amount of “whataboutery” could justify such a process.“If any process results in disenfranchising millions and millions of Indian citizens making them second class citizens in their own country in the sense of being citizens without voting rights, such a process is intrinsically arbitrary. No amount of whataboutery can justify it. It strikes at the very heart of the Constitution and I would go to the extent of saying that it is a negation of the constitutional order which we have adopted under the Constitution of India,” Bar and Bench quoted Justice Bhuyan as saying.He said the Constitution does not create two classes of citizens based on voting rights and added that wholesale disenfranchisement would violate Articles 326 and 14.“No authority can do it; no court can condone it. No one is above the Constitution,” he said.This is not the first time that Justice Bhuyan has put forth his views on issues being discussed in the public domain.Recently, NALSAR Hyderabad was in the news after a section of its students wrote to the vice chancellor, registrar and professors of the institution, opposing any proposal to invite Chief Justice of India Surya Kant as chief guest to the varsity’s convocation.
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Justice Bhuyan, who served as the Chancellor of NALSAR, on Sunday said he can be legitimately proud of the students of the institution.“You have shown to the country and the world what a university student, that too, a student of law, should be like. You are brilliant. You are bold and you are brave,” he said.
