The first national judicial pay commission has submitted its report. Its recommendations will mean more pay for the subordinate judiciary, those presiding over courts below the high courts. But perhaps more important, many of the absurdities and irrationalities that marked the service conditions and career prospects of these judges will be removed. The state governments have so far equated them mechanistically to various levels of the general administration, but now they will hopefully have -- provided the government agrees -- a niche within the integrated judicial system in the country with the Supreme Court at the apex and them at the grassroots.
The public knows well the terrible condition of the lower courts and the quality of their judges today but this was not always so. I grew up in a family in which the bread earner was such a judge and it is worth recalling his life and times to get a measure of how we have come to such a pass. My early years were spent in moving from one small district town to another in West Bengal as my father got transferred. And my abiding memory is that of my mother complaining that the family had so few friends. Judges then refused to socialise as a matter of policy; the more friends you have the greater the chance of developing obligations. These judges mostly befriended fellow judges in the same towns and it was a small circle of families which mostly visited each other. The men were great bores who knew no world other than their own and their every evening's conversation would eventually boil down to Section this and Section that of so and so Act and interpretations thereof.
I thought my father was incapable of making friends till after a particular transfer we had a visit from a legal heavyweight from the previous small town. They behaved like long-lost friends reunited and talked for hours. When he left I asked in amazement why he had never visited us when we were in his home town and my father said, how could he, surely judges and lawyers do not fraternise. Through many a court battle and cases lost and won the two
