'Judiciary lacks wherewithal to understand govt's objectives'

Amid an ongoing debate over judicial overreach, Law Minister Kapil Sibal today said the judiciary lacked the wherewithal to 'fully understand' how a government seeks to attain its objectives through its policies.

'Behind the cold prints of the law, there is a soul of a vision. You can decide on the cold prints of the law, but you cannot possibly realise the consequences of that...Which is why under the Constitution, we have this separation of powers,' he said.

He said under the separation of power, it is not the domain of the judiciary to 'fully understand' the 'vision' of a government which seeks to attain a particular objective.

'Not because it is not equipped to understand - I am sure that every judge of the superior judiciary is well equipped to understand that. But they don't have the wherewithal. They do not have the support system,' he said.

Sibal said formulation of a policy takes more than one year and it includes discussion with experts, past experience of the bureaucracy and issue of resources.

'That support system is not available with the judiciary. So if the judiciary was to actually decide for us on as to how to go about and what policy there should be and how that public interest is to be achieved, then there will be problems,' he said addressing a seminar on 'Competitiveness of corporate India and the legal system'.

He lamented that there were different definitions of public interest for the judiciary, government as well as the corporate sector.

'These competing concepts of public interests can only be resolved if we objectively agree on what our aim is...When a judge decides a particular matter, and he looks at public interest in the context of his own perception of public interest, he must make sure that the public interest speaks into the larger vision,' Sibal said.

He said if a judge decides cancel all the licences, it would lead to a large public debt which in turn will 'strain the banking system, which in turn will bring about a downturn to such an extent that it will bring a prosperous industry into steep decline.'

He, however, said telecom licences procured through fraudulent means should be cancelled but such cancellations should not be a policy prescription.