: Centre vs Collegium: Truth Becomes a Casualty #WorldNEWSAll The government has no moral right to question the collegium. Why? Read on A witness has to take an oath before deposition in a court of

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Centre vs Collegium: Truth Becomes a Casualty #WorldNEWSAll
The government has no moral right to question the collegium. Why? Read on
A witness has to take an oath before deposition in a court of law in the country. The oath is as follows, although the language varies from court to court: “I do swear in the name of God/solemnly affirm that I shall state the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth”. The truth is qualified as the “whole truth” and “nothing but the truth”.
What the oath indicates is that the court does not want to hear any coloured truth or half truth. For instance, it was announced during the Mahabharata war that Aswathama, the elephant, was killed.
When this was announced, the announcer said the words “the elephant” in a lower pitch. The purpose was to mislead Dronacharya into believing that his son Aswathama was killed in the war.
Dronacharya was so shocked by the news that he lost all interest in the war. He became an easy prey for the Pandavas.
The complete truth was that an elephant named Aswathama was killed and Dronacharya was not bereaved. This shows how crucial the “whole truth” is to reach a conclusion. The government and the Supreme Court have been indulging in half truths on the issue of collegium.
Let us, first of all, know what the system of collegium is. If you check the Constitution of India, which is the most voluminous constitution in the world, you will not find the word collegium there. If one goes by the dictionary, collegium means “a group in which each member has approximately equal power and authority”.
It came into vogue in the early nineties when the Centre was led by a string of leaders, who could be described only as weak as they did not enjoy any groundswell of support.
The Supreme Court made use of the situation to introduce what came to be known as the system of collegium to select, appoint and promote judges of the high courts and the Supreme Court through its own verdicts. As I mentioned, the government was too weak to resist it.
Until the early nineties, it was the government of the day which decided who should be the high court and supreme court judges. It is nobody’s contention that the government selected only yes men and yes women as judges. Justices of the calibre of VR Krishna Iyer also came up through this system, however flawed it was.
The collegium system that replaced the earlier system cannot be described as flawless by any standard. Anyway, under the collegium system, the chief justice of a high court and two senior most judges of the same court form the collegium that chooses judges in an almost informal manner.

There is an apex collegium headed by the Chief Justice of India and four senior-most judges of the Supreme Court.

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