A Sudden Flood of Mutiny?

Orders of the apex court are often flouted and some 1,000 cases have been filed under Section 66A of the IT Act, which was declared illegal. The Court has asked the centre to explain this brazen disregard

- Prof Upendra Baxi

IT seems a long time back that the Journal of the Indian Law Institute published my article: “Who Bothers About The Supreme Court? The Problem of Impact of Judicial Decisions”. Just no one bothered about this 1982 analysis! It was uniformly ignored by all concerned—including The Lordships of the Supreme Court, some of whom preside over the destiny of this great national institute of legal learning, which has now completed more than six decades of service to the nation.

Not just the Bench, the Bar also completely ignored what I said then. Succeeding generations of law academics and students have also continued with this compliment! Never the one to say die, though deeply puzzled by this indifference, I revived attention to this problem from 2015 onwards.

The obstinate and perverse reality of not-so-benign indifference to binding judicial decisions persists and is regarded actionable only now! Senior Counsel Sanjay Parikh and advocate Aparna Bhatt for the People’s Union of Civil Liberties have done gallant service to us all by bringing to the Supreme Court’s attention that about 1,000 cases have been filed under Section 66A of the Information Technology Act, which was declared five years ago as violating the fundamental rights in the Constitution. The decision in Shreya Singal was widely and rightly applauded.3