Om Mehta, the then Minister of State for Home, reported this audacious move to the Indira’s kitchen cabinet member Bengal chief minister Siddhartha Shankar Ray, who, as a senior advocate himself, knew how outrageous such an order sounded. He refers to an order issued on “to lock up the high courts”.Īlso read: How the Judiciary Defied the Government to Uphold Constitutional Values During the Emergency Granville Austin notes that a powerful individual in the Prime Minister’s house “apparently had it “in for” the high courts from the beginning”. In fact, the executive had anticipated that the high courts might show some spine. The darkness of Indira’s Emergency is also a story of the courage of many members of India’s Bar and the Bench. Gandhi has packed it with pliant and submissive judges except for a few.” But the record of the Supreme Court is unfortunately very disappointing, mainly because Mrs. “As for the judiciary, I must say that the High Courts have come out with flying colours in the present crisis. Rajinder Sachar, himself a judicial victim of the Emergency, maintains that if the Supreme Court had supported these brave high court justices, Indira’s Emergency itself would have collapsed.ĪG Noorani, in an article titled “ The judiciary and the Bar in India during the Emergency,” notes an opinion expressed by Jayaprakash Narayan about the judiciary during the emergency:

While Justice Khanna, who penned the dissent at the cost of the Chief Justiceship of India, cannot be grudged his canonisation, it must not be forgotten that the case which gave him the opportunity to demonstrate his judicial spine – ADM Jabalpur v Shiv Kant Shukla, 19 – arose out of orders passed by liberty minded justices of nine high courts who held that Indira Gandhi’s constitutional coup could not come in their way of defending the inalienable basic rights of the citizens.

Khanna’s transition from mortality to judicial immortality.

This iconic tribute by a journal several seas away marked H.R. It was Justice Khanna who spoke out fearlessly and eloquently for freedom this week in dissenting from the Court’s decision upholding the right of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s Government to imprison political opponents at will and without court hearings… The submission of an independent judiciary to absolutist government is virtually the last step in the destruction of a democratic society and the Indian Supreme Court’s decision appears close to utter surrender” “If India ever finds its way back to the freedom and democracy that were proud hallmarks of its first eighteen years as an independent nation, someone will surely erect a monument to Justice H R Khanna of the Supreme Court.

The emergency by coomi kapoor