A blight like no other

“There are two kinds of judges,” the late Indian lawyer-vizier Arun Jaitley once said, “those who know the law, and those who know the law minister.”

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This rang even truer when Jaitley’s boss, Narendra Modi, took a hatchet to India’s judiciary, hoping to stuff it with the executive’s men. The result was the 99th Amendment: like the 26th in Pakistan, the 99th was meant to stack the forum in charge of judicial appointments — reducing its judges, while bringing in the law minister and two worthies mainly selected by politicians.

As one can expect, the amendment landed in India’s Supreme Court, where it was struck down. To safeguard the rights of citizens, held Justice Khehar, the judiciary had to be kept “absolutely insulated and independent from the other organs of governance”. The day after the decision, the Indian Express headline ran, ‘Court supreme: Supreme Court’.

In the decade since, Modi, Shah & Co have had to rely on less direct ways to mangle the system — passing ugly laws and banking on servile intellectuals on the bench.

Still, had the court upheld the 99th Amendment, it would have had to surrender to its captors all at once. Instead, Modi is now faced with the tedious business of strangling judicial independence one slow tweak at a time. “We are the only country in the world where judges appoint judges,” moaned Jaitley.