Sibal says the top court is no longer the place to go seeking justice. You won’t get it, he said, suggesting other proactive avenues. In Sibal’s book, justice cannot be snatched from the judge’s gavel and cannot be knocked out of the court’s attitude! As it happens, cases are assigned to select judges and then what would happen everybody knows beforehand.

In Sibal’s book, victory is all that counts, and without victory nothing is sporting. A few recent judgments haven’t been fair in Sibal’s reckoning. To be fair, there’s a reason for Sibal’s resentment. He and his ilk know the Supreme Court judges by far more than any elephant in the room.

To state it without much fanfare, Kapil Sibal has no hope left in the Supreme Court. Those are his words, not that of any Tom, Dick or Harry. He was talking on the "Judicial Rollback of Civil Liberties" and he did not like the top court’s conclusion in the Zakia Jafri case which gave Prime Minister Narendra Modi a clean chit.

Sibal was Zakia’s counsel. And it must rankle. Sibal is also not impressed with the verdict upholding the stringent provisions of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act. Sibal failed the Opposition by losing in court. Read right, Sibal appeared to advocate street justice, but an ED with vast powers isn’t Kapil Sibal’s kind of ED.

Actually, Sibal more than anybody else has reason to be angry. He has served 50 years in the Supreme Court. Worse, he knows things will not change even after the “landmark judgement”, like when the court struck down Section 377 and the ground reality for the LGBTQ remained unchanged.

"Independence is only possible when we stand up for our own rights and demand independence," the veteran lawyer suggested a way out. It is good that Sibal is not the charismatic Nehru or the firebrand Netaji, or there would have been crowds in the streets of Delhi and Mumbai, asking why wasn’t the Fire-Brigade called when Gujarat was burning in 2002?

Documents that survived the rioting and the arson showed the Fire Brigade was not called to extinguish the fires. And yet the SIT appointed by the Supreme Court gave a clean chit. Sibal’s grouse is that the Supreme Court chose to ignore the evidence. An entire regiment of people agree. But does that mean, everybody should be in the streets fleecing the government of positive action?

Sibal also attacked the top court for making adverse remarks against Teesta Setalvad which led to her illegal arrest. Being a seasoned politician, Sibal saw a politically-sensitive case when one came along. And he has had enough of such cases going to predictably select justices.

Sibal called it compromising the independence of the court, the finger pointing at the Chief Justice of India. Point is, if a senior lawyer can state it so, then the rest of India can also voice the thought for no rhyme, and every reason: The CJI is the one who “decides which matter will be dealt with by which bench and when.”

Regarding the PMLA judgement of the Supreme Court, Sibal hit out at the ED in the “extremely dangerous” column and said it had "crossed the lines of individual liberty." The Supreme Court had no idea what it was adjudicating on. How could the top court conclude ED officers are not police officers? The Supreme Court can no longer be trusted if it upheld such laws.

The long and short of it is, the SC as it stands now is untrustworthy, biased, squarely in the government’s court and unfit to handle sensitive political cases that question the government and its actions. Sibal was particularly talking of Siddique Kappan who continues to languish behind bars for being in a car going someplace.

Counsel Kapil Sibal is not the only person who seems to be urging the people to look beyond the Supreme Court for solutions to the vexed problems labouring the nation in these allegedly deadly times for a supposedly beleaguered nation. Top Opposition leaders have done so, and so have leading civil society figures. And, now, atop legal-eagle. (IPA Service)