Kasaragod: Prime Minister Narendra Modi is behind the letter sent by 600 lawyers to the Chief Justice of India alleging that courts were being pressurised by "vested interest", said CPM state Secretary M V Govindan.
He alleged that the Prime Minister orchestrated the letter because he was upset over the Supreme Court judgment striking down the Electoral Bonds as unconstitutional.
Govindan made the allegations at the 83rd anniversary of the Kayyur Rebellion in Kasaragod's Kayyur village on Friday, March 29.
On March 26, 600 lawyers, including senior advocate Harish Salve and Bar Council of India chairperson Manan Kumar Mishra, wrote to the Chief Justice of India D Y Chandrachud, alleging that a "vested interest group" is trying to put pressure on the judiciary and defame courts "on the basis of frivolous logic and stale political agendas".
"Their pressure tactics are most obvious in political cases, particularly those involving political figures accused of corruption. These tactics are damaging to our courts and threaten our democratic fabric,” said the letter with the subject 'Judiciary Under Threat-Safeguarding Judiciary from Political and Professional Pressure'.
On March 28, Prime Minister Modi endorsed the lawyers' mail by reposting the news of the letter on X. "To browbeat and bully others is vintage Congress culture," he posted.
Five decades ago itself they (the Congress) had called for a "committed judiciary", Modi wrote on X. "They shamelessly want commitment from others for their selfish interests but desist from any commitment towards the nation. No wonder 140 crore Indians are rejecting them," the Prime Minister wrote.
M V Govindan said Prime Minister Modi's post was shocking but he made the comments because he could not withstand a series of judgments that went against the BJP.
When a presiding officer tried to sabotage the corporation election in Chandigarh, the Supreme Court intervened and the result went against the BJP, said Govindan. After that, the Supreme Court on February 15 declared the Electoral Bond Scheme unconstitutional, scrapped it and ordered the State Bank of India to make public all the details of the scheme. "Soon after the judgment, Supreme Court Bar Association president, who is an RSS man, wrote to the Indian President (Droupadi Murmu) asking her to stop the implementation of the verdict," Govindan said.
Four days later, Prime Minister Modi launched a scathing attack on the apex court by comparing the corporate funding the ruling BJP got with poor Sudama gifting beaten rice to his childhood friend Lord Krishna. "I was stunned to read in papers what Modi said. He said the Supreme Court would have ruled that Lord Krishna indulged in corruption by accepting the beaten rice as a gift from Sudama," said Govindan.
(In the mythology, Sudama, struggling to feed his children, had gone to Lord Krishna to seek help. But even without asking, Lord Krishna made Sudama wealthy.)
The same Prime Minister, who cast doubts on the Supreme Court after the electoral bond verdict, is behind the letters by the advocates, Govindan said.
Before the SBI made the details public, the people thought Adani and Ambani would be the only few buyers of the bonds, he said. "But the details prove that the BJP-led government was running an extortion racket using every constitutional agency," he alleged.
The CPM and the CPI did not accept money through electoral bonds as a matter of principle and challenged the scheme in the Supreme Court, he said.
