"I am sorry to say but Your Lordships can pass any number of orders but the Parliament can say it is not in interest of the country and enact a law, "Venugopal has been quoted as replying to Justice Hemant Gupta who posed a question to the government whether it was not nullifying the order of the court by making a legislation to that effect.

Parliament, of course, has the powers to enact any law that is required to protect the interests of the people, as claimed by the attorney general. But the trouble is the tenor of his statement suggests that the government owns parliament, which is not the case in any true parliamentary democracy.

Coming as it is from a person of Venugopal’s eminence, it signals a dangerous portend. He may be accused of something similar to how the Modi government described the conduct of Bengal chief secretary Alapan Bandhopadhyay: ‘a severe dent to the IAS steel frame’. Government sources were reported as saying "a chief secretary can't be working like personal staff of Chief Minister, no matter howsoever senior…He is Chief Secretary to the state, not to the Chief Minister."

The attorney general is not known to make off the cuff remarks. He says things after deep consideration of whatever he means. He has criticised the Supreme Court in similar or even harsher terms before. A couple of years ago, while delivering the Second J Dadachanji Memorial Debate he had criticised the Supreme Court for its overdependence on the constitutional morality, which he described as very, very dangerous and hoped that constitutional morality die at the earliest. He accused the apex court of garnering to itself vast power, which ‘no apex court in the world has ever exercised’.

"As a powerful weapon that surpasses all the powers conferred on the Supreme Court by the Constitution, Article 142 merely permits the court to pass such decrees or orders as to do complete justice in any cause or matter pending before the court. But the article is treated as a 'Kamadhenu' from which unlimited powers flows to the apex court of the country," he added. He further complained that laws are struck down on a strict and literal interpretation of the constitution.

More than a tussle for one-upmanship between the judiciary and the legislature, the trouble here is when the government of the day thinks that it owns parliament, which unfortunately is the preferred view of the Modi government. All authoritarian governments are known to treat the incumbent authority as the permanent authority and many of the misdeeds of the Modi government can be traced to such abrasive thinking.

The government at best has control over parliament, but it does not own parliament, which belongs to the people. While it is true that elections provide the people’s mandate to the winning party or combination, it does not vest the government with the ownership of parliament in a way it can be used for the rulers’ whims and fancies. Even when a government enjoys complete domination in parliament, there are areas that are strict no-go for the executive, with or without the backing of the legislature. A brute majority cannot be used to enact a law, for instance, that bans all opposition, although the government may love to do that.

So just as the attorney general laments about the danger posed by constitutional morality, the concentration of unlimited powers at the hands of the government, armed with its temporary control over parliament, is even more dangerous. The situation becomes all the more harmful when a government, just as it is the case with the Modi government, thinks that it is going to be permanent. Many of the actions of the incumbent government not only suffer from short-sight, they also betray a lack of understanding that tomorrow it could be at the receiving end when some other party or combination can assume power.

For instance, the Modi government equates itself with India and any criticism against the government is treated as an act of sedition. It is symptomatic of the sorry state of affairs prevailing in the country that the Supreme Court had to state in no unambiguous terms that criticism of the prime minister or a wrong policy of the government does not amount to sedition and journalists cannot be hauled up for that. That the court has had to state this explicitly shows the extent to which the government has used laws that are meant to deal with treason and other such grave offence against the state are being used to ward off criticism of the pitfalls in handling the pandemic, particularly, the botched vaccination policy. (IPA Service)