NAND KISHORE SINGH Vs. UNION OF INDIA

JUDGEMENT

(1.) THE Court gets an occasion to speak out only when there is a cause before it. Judicial discipline demands silence, export when deciding a case. There are times when there are political upheavals and the Courts of the nation may have to remain spectators only. The Constitutions of nations are overhauled, yet the judiciary must keep quiet. Nations may move from democracy to dictatorship, while the judiciary watches the situation with pain, if it has love for democracy, and yet cannot express itself when this somersault takes place.

(2.) THESE matters before the Court, however, are about grass root democracy not having functioned in State of Bihar for one whole generation, giving the Court cause to comment. A State affidavit filed the day before yesterday acknowledges as an official declaration that grass root democracy in Bihar has been absent for 22 years. Normally, politicians in power rarely acknowledge that they function without full democracy, even if democracy does not function while politics thrive. This acknowledgement by the State is also acceptance of a situation that for more than two decades a generation has grown up without even knowing what grass root democracy is about.

(3.) FOR the last five years the people of Bihar were mesmerised into believing a falsehood that the Courts, the High Court and the Supreme Court, were responsible for not permitting the holding of elections to bring in local self government, so that grass root democracy can function. The unfortunate part is that the people believed this story. It was a difficult job to make the State record surface. When the records did surface before this Court it was found that the Courts had never prevented anyone in power in Bihar from holding the elections that would re -establish grass root democracy. This Court certified that there is no stay order of the Supreme Court, By August of this year the Supreme Court also clarified that it had never passed any stay order preventing the powers which rule Bihar from holding elections of local bodies. But, the game was not abandoned. Now the Directorate of Census was brought in to tell the High Court that the statistics of Census is very important and there is a Constitutional obligation to hold a Census the first year after every decade and as the year 2000 passes into 2001, the counting of the people of Bihar will also begin. That this is a time consuming job and it will not end until the first quarter of next year. Therefore the High Court was being informed that the Central Government has laid down that the Census must be completed first, and the elections will be held after the Census figures are available, as these logically effect the constituencies and the representation of people in the legislature and Parliament. The Government of Bihar joined the Directorate of Census in claiming that elections to return local self government will have to wait until the Census operations are over. The Court was also being told that on a certain fixed date everything will come to a halt when heads are being counted for Census 2001. The Court had been told emphatically by the Directorate of Census, Government of India, through its standing counsel, that everything else will have to wait until the Census is over.