Be wary of trial by the media, Tharoor tells judiciary

Kozhikode

Shashi Tharoor, Congress MP, has urged judicial officers to be aware of the “trial by the media” in sensationalised cases.

He was delivering a talk organised by the Calicut Bar Association on ‘Law and the idea of India’ here on Monday.

Mr. Tharoor pointed out that the free Press in the country had now intruded upon the prospects of justice. He said he was troubled by a large number of recent instances in which the media, in addition to playing the role of a witness and observer, had appointed itself the prosecutor, judge, jury and even the executioner.

“Judges must be aware of this new tendency and conscious of its dangers for the democratic and constitutional system and the rule of law. After all, judges are members of our society and are exposed to our media despite their undoubted judicial rectitude. It is difficult to imagine that they are completely uninfluenced by the media that they consume daily,” Mr. Tharoor said.

The Congress MP said there had been innumerable instances during the journey of the Constitution, which had either corroded, preserved or nurtured the idea of India.

“Activist judges have taken the Constitution beyond strict legislation to promote human rights and welfare in a series of landmark judgments. One of the great achievements of the judiciary in our country has been to expand women’s rights through judicial pronouncements rather than necessarily through laws. A more striking example is the extension by the Supreme Court of granting human rights to the LGBTQ community, which Parliament did not have the courage to do,” Mr. Tharoor said.

He, however, claimed that the Victorian era Indian Penal Code, drafted by Lord Macaulay without consulting any Indian and enacted in 1861, was full of inequities that undermined the quality of the rule of law. Many of its provisions have ceased to apply in Britain itself. These include the sedition law, Section 124 (A) of the IPC, which was being misused by State governments and lower courts despite the Supreme Court rulings that sedition should only apply to incitement of violence, he added.