Law Day Lecture [SCC Archives]

Over the last 50 years, the Supreme Court of India has established itself as one of the indisputably great courts of the world. No other court in the free world exercises jurisdiction over more than a small fraction of the nearly one billion men, women and children who form the population of India. The Golden Jubilee of this Court is accordingly a matter of much more than local importance. I am greatly honoured to have this opportunity to pay tribute to its achievements over this crucial and formative period of its and the country’s history.

The honour and the pleasure are all the greater for a visitor from the United Kingdom since for over two centuries, for better or worse — I hope not wholly for worse — our fortunes and histories were so closely intertwined.

The late Sir Penderel Moon — one of the last generation of British civil servants in India, a very intelligent man, deeply devoted to India and its peoples — strongly criticised his British fellow-countrymen for bequeathing to independent India institutions based on a British model which were, he thought, alien and unsuited to the genius of the country. In this criticism he very expressly included the legal system.¹ Although lacking his knowledge and experience of India, let alone the knowledge and experience of my present audience, I find that to be not only a disappointing judgment, but also a surprising one, which indeed I find hard to accept.

It is doubtless true that the first Judge to exercise jurisdiction in Surat in the seventh century contributed little to world jurisprudence. He was a retired sea captain, and was removed from judicial office for refusing to pay his debts. He then enrolled as a captain of infantry but was again in trouble for an offence which (in the reticent words of those reporting it to the authorities) “we know not well how to put into such decent terms as may become us to your Honours”.² It is also true that for long periods, particularly at the lower levels there was a marked lack of differentiation between the exercise of judicial and executive power: This may well have made for the effective enforcement of judicial orders, and perhaps encouraged the friendly resolution of civil disputes, but it would have offended any purist.

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^† On the occasion of the Golden Jubilee Celebrations of the Supreme Court of India on 26-11-1999 at Vigyan Bhavan, New Delhi.

** This Article was first published in Supreme Court Cases (2000) 1 SCC J-29. It has been reproduced with the kind permission of Eastern Book Company.

¹ Moon, Strangers in India (1945); Divide and Quit (1961).

² Woodruff, The Men who Ruled India, Vol. 1, p. 58.

Picture Credits: telegraph.co.uk