8 - Judiciary and Lawyers

Summary

With words a dispute can be won,

With words a system can be spun.

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust

Today the gates have receded to remoter and loftier places; no one points the way; many carry swords, but only to brandish them, and the eye that tries to follow them is confused. So, perhaps, it is really best to do as Bucephalus has done, and absorb oneself in law books.

—Franz Kafka, The New Advocate

Why not wait for this court or that court to decide? I want to tell them that a few million people have waited for too long a period. There is not going to be much more waiting by these millions outside.

—Jawaharlal Nehru, Debate on the Constitution(First Amendment) Bill

Raj Darbhanga, in the province of Bihar, was one of the largest landed estates in colonial India. The size of the estate was 2,400 square miles, and it spanned over six districts. The landlord of this estate was Kameshwar Singh, KCIE, the abbreviation at the end standing for ‘Knight Commander of the Indian Empire’. It was an honour that Singh had earned, like his ancestors, by being a reliable ally of the colonial government. When the British departed, Singh became, like several of his peers, a member of the Constituent Assembly. There his most notable contribution was an impassioned speech against any kind of land reform on the grounds that it would be discriminatory towards landlords like him. ‘Does it behove such an august Assembly as this,’ he asked, ‘to discard principles and disfigure the edifice which is sought to be built on the four pillars of Justice, Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, by introducing iniquitous discrimination?’ Singh's argument did not carry the day in the assembly. The Bihar Land Reforms Act was passed within months of the constitution coming into effect. It then required, as the constitution stipulated, the assent of the president. The president, Rajendra Prasad, was himself from Bihar and friendly to the powerful landlords. He initially refused to give his assent and retracted only when Nehru threatened to resign. That was, however, not the end of the story.