We need to
discuss if the CM’s office should be an integrity institution
The response to the Ahmedabad
metropolitan magistrate’s order, which says, “According to SIT, no offence has
been established against any of the 58 persons listed in Zakia’s complaint”,
has to be ethical and philosophical, not ideological. We must accept that a
judgment has been given and legal procedures followed (properly or not will be
examined in the ensuing challenge before a higher court) and hence without
going into the issue of the evidence available — 40,000 pages of the SIT
report — and whether it meets the standards of the Indian Evidence Act, we
still have to take a position on the magistrate’s order.
Since former Congress MP Ehsan
Jafri and 68 others were killed or burnt to death in the Gulberg Society
riots, while there was a democratic government in power that drew its
authority from the Indian Constitution, we are required to reconcile the hard
fact of the carnage with the minimum guarantees of due process and
constitutional protection to all citizens. This reconciling can be attempted
by introducing another level of argument into the debate on the delivery of
justice in Gujarat. Somebody must be held responsible for what happened.
There have been times in the
evolution of our Constitution when the apex court has responded to the legal
complexities of a case by formulating new judicial doctrines that have helped
us make progress on the issue and thereby strengthen the constitutional order.
Indian jurisprudence has grown with doctrines such as “basic structure”,
“rarest of rare”, “guilty until proven innocent” or “right to life includes
right to a clean environment”. Oddly enough, the doctrine that comes to mind,
and seems to be relevant to the Gulberg Society massacre case, is that of
“integrity institutions” formulated by the Kapadia court in the CVC case of
P.J. Thomas.
The doctrine is simple: people
who head “integrity institutions” must be above suspicion and even if the
judicial system has not completed the process of examining the evidence and
establishing the guilt or innocence of the person beyond reasonable doubt (as
was the case with CVC Thomas), the fact that they are charged with a crime is
sufficient basis to debar them from heading integrity institutions. If the
doctrine is to be universally applied, the issues that need to be debated are
whether the office of the chief minister is an integrity institution, what
constitutes integrity, whether Narendra Modi has been charged (not whether he
is guilty) and whether this debars him from occupying office. The Gulberg
Society case places this moral burden on the public discourse, and on the apex
court, to refine further its doctrine of “integrity institutions”. Since the
court is seized with several issues of corruption that involve high offices
and it is fairly active in its monitoring of these cases, it is perhaps
apposite for it to tell us to which institutions the “integrity institution”
doctrine applies.
Continue reading at: http://www.expressindia.com/
