Parmanand Pandey
Shri K.G. Balakrishnan, Ex-chief Justice of India and presently the Chairman of Human Rights Commission is doing more damage to the institution of judiciary than to himself by clinging on to the post without any sense of shame or remorse. Now when it has come to light that he and his relatives have amassed huge amount of wealth and property in the period when he held the office of a judge of the High Court and the Supreme Court. Inexplicably, instead of clearing the cloud of suspicion, he is maintaining mysterious silence, which is further strengthening the doubt. The conduct of justice Balakrishnan, in fact, has not been above board for quite long time. For instance; he stubbornly opposed the applicability of the Right to Information Act on the judges of the Supreme Court. This was ludicrous to say the least. Being the Chief of the Apex Court, he should have been first to welcome the idea of declaring the assets and liabilities by the judges but he resisted it to the last minute till he was forced to do so by an order of the Hon’ble High Court of Delhi. So much so, he directed the Supreme Registry to file an Appeal in the Supreme Court impugning the judgment/order of the High Court.
He brazenly raised technical and hyper technical points to conceal his assets. At long last, the information that he posted on the website of the Supreme Court was very sketchy. In fact, it was more concealing than revealing one. This was the reason he got a rebuff from Justice Shylendra Kumar of Karnataka, who was very forthcoming in declaring his assets. Surprisingly he even tried to prevent Justice Shylendra Kumar from writing on his blog under the ploy that judges should speak only through their judgments.
Secondly, he made last the ditch efforts for the elevation of the discredited judge of Karnataka High Court, Mr. Dinakaran, who has been found to be a highly corrupt judge by more than one government agency; apart from, the team of eminent persons, who enquired into the allegations against him. When the pressure was building up for the resignation of Dinakaran, he was advised K.G. Balakrishnan to simply keep away from the judicial work for some time. Dinakaran, the shameless; as he is, stuck to his post; bought time and ultimately accepted the transfer to the Sikkim High Court.
Now when the stories of amassing of wealth, highly disproportionate to his known source of income have come to light, the minimum that is expected from him is to resign from the post of the Chairman of the National Human Rights Commission. As the former Chief Justice of India, JS Verma has rightly said that corruption is the biggest violation of Human Rights, and therefore, you cannot expect the protection of human rights from a corrupt violator like Justice Balakrishnan. He must immediately vacate the high post of the NHRC Chairman to same the dignity of the institution. If he fails to see the reason, he must be removed because nobody can be above law.