SAMANWAYA RAUTRAY WRITES FOR ECONOMIC TIMES
Narendra Modi had to fill in his wifes name for the first time in his nomination papers because of a ruling by P Sathasivam that candidates couldnt leave any columns blank.Not putting down Jashodabens name might have left the BJP prime ministerial candidate vulnerable to prosecution.Sathasivam,the 40th chief justice of India,will leave office in a few days,as he turns 65,after spending about a year in the job,having succeeded Altamas Kabir in July 2013.
Apart from the decision above,Sathasivam was responsible for a handful of rulings that had wide-ranging impact on issues such as clemency for death row convicts and his tenure took place at a time when the Supreme Court was rocked by sexual harassment allegations against former judges.
ET spoke to lawyers and other legal experts and asked how they would assess his term of office.Many were unanimous in saying that his most important contribution was giving voters the ability to express their rejection of candidates at election time through the none of the above or NOTA option.
Sathasivam asked the Election Commission to make sure that a NOTA button was provided on the voting machine.Justice Sathasivam is a good judge.He lent a degree of balance to the court after the rather chaotic stint of Justice Kabir.He took a definite stand on NOTA, said constitutional expert and senior advocate Rajeev Dhavan.He took a humane approach in death penalty cases,Dhavan said.
He plugged loopholes in the law to ensure that no government would hang someone in seeming haste for apparently political reasons,as in the case of Parliament attack case accused Mohammad Afzal Guru,without informing the convicts family.Sathasivam ruled that the families of death row convicts would get an opportunity for final farewells.
The convict would also get time to put affairs in order before the sentence was carried out.The outgoing CJI--a soft-spoken,courteous,unfailingly polite and patient man according to people who dealt with him in court and outside it--also made it legally impossible for the state to execute the mentally ill or medically unfit.Any prolonged and unnecessary delay in carrying out a death sentence would entitle a convict to have his sentence commuted to life,he said.
That ruling that may not have gone down well with a government opposed to clemency for the likes of Devinder Pal Singh Bhullar,who was convicted of involvement in a terrorist bomb attack in Delhi but whose mental health had deteriorated while on death row.
It also meant a reprieve for those sentenced in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case as their sentence hadnt been carried out for more than a decade.Others cited his decision to free the ailing,wheel-chair bound octogenarian Khalil Chisti,involved in a 20-year-old murder case,to return to Pakistan as a sign of his compassion as a judge.
After becoming CJI,Justice Sathasivam has behaved well, said activist lawyer and Aam Aadmi Party leader Prashant Bhushan.He has delivered a number of good judgements such as NOTA and on human rights in particular, Bhushan said.
However,his ruling in the Muzzafarnagar riots was disappointing, he said.Justice Sathasivam indicted both the Akhilesh Singh Yadav government and the central government for failing to prevent the riots,but lauded Uttar Pradesh for post-riots relief and rehabilitation efforts,based on the claims made by it.
Activists on the ground have said that this doesnt necessarily match the ground situation.Dhavan,however,contested this view.Justice Sathasivam did a good job in the riots case,a very balanced job, he said.
He heard the case with extreme patience,passed orders to improve things. Sathasivams administrative acumen,despite lack of experience as a High Court chief justice came in for fair degree of praise.He had moved to the Supreme Court in 2007 after serving as a judge in the Madras and Punjab and Haryana High Courts.He allocated work in a satisfactory manner,brought to the fore constitution benches to deal with complicated legal issues, Dhavan said.
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