The Supreme Court of India, which is going through a bad patch in its history, gets a new helmsman in Justice NV Ramana this week.

In a bid to block his elevation, the Chief Minister of his home state of Andhra Pradesh, YS Jagan Moham Reddy, had written a letter to outgoing Chief Justice SA Bobde levelling allegations of partisanship   against him.

Justice Bobde cleared him of the charges through an in-house process, details of which were not disclosed. Justice Ramana takes over as Chief Justice of India at a time when arrears of cases are mounting in the superior courts. An immediate cause for this is the large number of judges’ posts that are lying vacant.

Parliament was told in February that over 400 posts of judges in 25 High Courts were vacant.

The Centre says the Supreme Court Collegium has been slow in recommending names to fill vacancies. The Supreme Court says the Centre has been slow in responding to recommendations.

The Attorney General told the Supreme Court last week that the Centre will take a decision within three months on a set of Collegium recommendations which has been with it for more than six months.

Why does the government need nine months to take decisions on a matter like this?

Following the retirement of Justice Ranjan Gogoi and three other, four of the 34 judges’ posts in the Supreme Court fell vacant last year. There were no immediate recommendations from the Collegium to fill these vacancies.

Clearly both the Centre and the Collegium are not showing the sense of urgency expected of them.

There are some institutional issues like court procedures which have remained unattended for long. Lately some new issues have also cropped up.

Between 1981 and 1998, through three judgments, the Supreme Court had seized primacy in the matter of appointment and transfer of judges from the Executive.

In the process India earned the dubious distinction of being the only country where judges have the last word in the appointment of judges.

The Collegium, comprising the seniormost judges of the Supreme Court, makes recommendations in this regard. These are binding on the Centre in terms of court verdicts.

The Collegium is an extra-constitutional body created by the court. Several eminent jurists s have voiced reservations about the Collegium system.

A national debate on the subject led to a wide measure of agreement among both jurists and politicians on the establishment of a national judicial commission to make recommendations on appointment, transfer and promotion of judges.

On assuming office, Prime Minister Narendra Modi pushed through Parliament a measure to give effect to this idea. The Supreme Court struck it down. The Modi regime later got the Collegium to drop some names it had recommended, by drawing attention to adverse reports about the persons’ antecedents.

In 2018, four seniormost judges of the Supreme Court took the unusual step of calling a press conference to tell the   nation that all is not well with the institution.

Speaking for the group, Justice J. Chelameswar criticised the way then Chief Justice Dipak Misra assigned cases to benches for hearing.

“Administration of the Supreme Court is not in order and many things which are less than desirable have happened in the last few months,” he said.

When Justice Ranjan Gogoi, who was at the press conference, became the CJI, he too invited criticism on the issue of assignment of cases. He also faced a sexual harassment charge by a court assistant. The circumstances in which the allegation arose and the manner in which he cleared his name left several questions unanswered.

A notable judgment of the Gogoi court allotted the site of the demolished mosque at Ayodhya to Hindus to build a Ram temple and gave Muslims an alternative site to build a new mosque.

Many welcomed it in the hope that it would put an end to a communal dispute. Ayodhya-style disputes raised in courts in Mathura and Varanasi last week about two mosques suggest it may be a forlorn hope.   

When petitions challenging the constitutional validity of the laws that altered the status of Jammu and Kashmir came up, Justice Gogoi put them aside, saying he wants to give the government more time.

His successor, Justice Bobde will also be leaving without taking up the J&K petitions. In an overreaction to two critical tweets, Justice Bobde hauled up Prashant Bhushan, a senior lawyer, on charges of contempt of court.

Justice Ramana will be CJI for just 16 months. It is too short a period to solve all problems of the Judiciary but not to make a beginning.