Courting irrelevance

The judiciary should choose its battles carefully

The Supreme Court has chosen to uphold Chandigarh’s decision to denotify local and state highways and turn them into district roads. The city administration’s decision was obviously aimed at steering clear of the apex court’s order of December 2016 banning the sale of alcohol within 500 metres of state and national highways. In his latest order, Chief Justice J S Khehar argued that the roads being denotified were within the city limits and as such did not carry “fast moving traffic”. It is noteworthy that just six months ago, the Supreme Court had banned the sale of liquor, as well as installation of any signage and billboards to that effect, within 500 meters of highways on the reasoning that such things distract drivers and lead to drunken driving and accidents. 

The December 2016 ban was not justified on a variety of reasons. For one, data suggests that drunken driving is a minor reason for road accidents on state and national highways. In fact, according to 2015 official statistics, driver error accounted for 77 per cent of accidents. Within this category, it was speeding that accounted for 61 per cent of the deaths. Driving under the influence (of drugs or alcohol) accounted for just 6.4 per cent of deaths due to drivers’ faults and merely 4.6 per cent of all fatalities in road accidents. Two, the ban led to an estimated annual loss of Rs 65,000 crore, not to mention the hundreds of jobs lost. But most importantly, it was a clear case of judicial overreach and it was obvious from the beginning that such a ban was not easy to implement. Soon enough, different states started finding innovative ways to bypass the ban — denotifying state highways was one such move. On the face of it, then, the Supreme Court’s latest decision to allow such a denotification could be hailed for the relief it brings, though the Chief Justice justified the overall ban by saying that the idea behind the court’s earlier verdict was that a driver should not be under the influence of liquor at places where there is high-speed traffic. 

But the more pertinent question is: Should the higher judiciary waste its time pronouncing judgments which are either clearly an overreach, or unimplementable or just add to the confusion? For instance, in November last year, Justice Dipak Misra of the Supreme Court had made it mandatory for everyone to stand for national anthems in cinema halls. In the ensuing months, he and other judges were occupied giving clarifications why there shouldn’t be anthems in courts or how the disabled could be exempted from following this order. Similarly, in December 2015, the court decided to ban the registration of diesel cars with engines bigger than 2,000 cc. That led to a massive chaos with key carmakers such as Toyota announcing it will halt further investments in India for the lack of policy clarity. Eight months later this ban was lifted. In a country such as India, where genuine cases of injustice drag on for years for the lack of adequate availability of court time, the higher courts surely can choose their battles and prioritise the cases they hear.