Making law isn't child's play

Making a law is no more child’s play. Neither the lawmakers nor the panel drafting the Lokpal Bill can feel assured that the final outcome of the much-awaited law wouldn’t be disturbed by the court.

A high court, though refusing to accept the plea for scraping the Lokpal panel, asserted that the role of the court would come into play after the law is enacted and notified by the government.
In fact, noted jurist and former apex court justice V R Krishna Iyer said in 1980: “The court is handcuffed in this jurisdiction and cannot raise its hand against what, it thinks, is a foolish choice. Wisdom in administrative action is the property of the executive and judicial circumspection keeps the court lock-jawed save where the power has been polluted with oblique ends or is otherwise void on well-established grounds.’’

His opinion aired 31 years ago is now a legally accepted judicial mandate. Earlier the Union government would include any law that’s dear to its heart and which might not be upheld by a court of law in the sacred ‘ninth schedule’. This schedule became packed to its capacity as the government started stuffing it with even those which had been scraped by a court on various constitutional objections.

Thus, the sincerity of the motive behind the law making is of paramount importance. It must not be forgotten that the contents don’t defy the fundamental rights such as equality, right to life and, natural justice and are not  mala fide or arbitrary.
By any stretch of legislative ingenuity, the principle of constitutionalism that requires control over the exercise of governmental power to ensure that it upholds the democratic principles can’t be sacrificed.
However, a mountain of enactments that the British rulers framed centuries ago still find a solemn place in the free India’s legal and administrative space. Why the government and the lawmakers have been silent on these pre-1947 laws is not understandable.

That too when the two administrative reforms commissions in the recent past identified as many as 1,300 archaic laws that needs to scrapped or amended. There are at least 10 laws enacted in 1800s which rule the citizens. It seems to be an equally uphill task for the lawmakers to even rubbish the anti-citizens laws.