NEW DELHI: The ten-day long educative debate before a five-judge Supreme Court bench on the Presidential Reference seeking the apex court’s opinion on the judiciary’s power to fix timelines for the President and governors as well as grant ‘deemed assent’ to pending bills was a serious affair but was not shorn of humour.When a bench of Chief Justice B R Gavai, and Justices Surya Kant, Vikram Nath, P S Narasimha and A S Chandurkar broke for a discussion, solicitor general Tushar Mehta, who was going full steam, said, “I wish I had taken some classes on lip reading. When judges discuss something among themselves when we are arguing, we become apprehensive.”CJI Gavai said, “We were not discussing something that was argued during the last three weeks. It is not like a colleague of ours in Bombay HC, who used to draw sketches during long arguments. He used to paint and do carpentry and what not, except deciding cases.”When Mehta was jumping from paragraph to paragraph of his rejoinder and skipping many in between while speed-reading with explanations to meet the deadline for concluding his arguments, the CJI said, “I became an SC judge in 2019. Even after six years, I am unable to keep pace with Delhi lawyers, who read the first sentence and then the tenth one before moving on to some other sentence.” “Four of us on the bench, except for Justice Narasimha, find it difficult to match the speed of SC lawyers. Sometimes we feel lost. We will read the entire written submissions which run into more than 5,000 pages including the annexures,” he said.Justice Narasimha, who was practising in SC prior to his elevation as a judge, said, “This is a message for the next generation lawyers, who should not adopt this practice of skip reading.”The AG cited a Greek mythological concept – Procrustean Bed – to persuade SC not to create space for states to seek amendment of the Constitution, the sole prerogative of Parliament, through judicial verdicts.Procrustes was a Greek mythological giant who tied travellers to an iron bed. If their legs protruded out, he used to cut them to fit them to the size of the bed. If it fell short, he used to stretch them. The terminology Procrustean Bed is used to explain a phenomenon when a provision is moulded as per the demand of a situation.Mehta said if timelines are fixed for governors, who are there to protect the Constitution and prevent unconstitutional acts of govt, it would result in self-destruction and counterproductive. Governors exercise the discretion of withholding assent only in rare situations and history tells us that more than 94% of bills were assented to and the assent was withheld only to 20 out of over 17,000 bills in the last 55 years.
