A long Institutional Road https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/pratap-bhanu-mehta-writes-on-recent-supreme-court-verdicts-hold-the-celebrations-9176080/lite/ by Pratap Bhanu Mehta February 23, 2024 s: On recent Supreme Court verdicts, hold the celebrations
While SC judgments on electoral bonds and Chandigarh mayoral election are welcome, they ought not to merely be an episodic legitimisation of the façade of constitutionalism. They need to be part of a pattern that challenges the consolidation of authoritarianism and communalism
One has to keep two features of political legitimation in mind. The first is that any institution, particularly the Court, has to often balance not antagonising the executive with considerations of its own legitimacy. If its own legitimacy collapses, it poses a threat to the existence of the institution....where the Courts have a track record of facilitating the Executive’s authoritarian or repressive agenda, it should not come as a surprise that there are decisions that do not favour the government’s positions. Often these decisions will be in areas which actually do not attack the government’s core ideological project, such as Hindutva-related issues or a civil liberties issue, where the government has a serious rather than a peripheral political stake...
You would have thought that a week in which an initiative by the government like electoral bonds was declared unconstitutional, or an election officer was blatantly fixing a mayoral poll, would embarrass the BJP. But these actions are not seen as a sign of the moral inadequacy, institutional untrustworthiness or threat to democracy posed by the ruling BJP. They are, at most, considered tactical mistakes, or minor stupidities, of no consequence electorally.
WA FM - I disagree often with him but this is a really excellent analysis... Just goes straight into the heart of the matter
It is also an indictment of our own society