In New Jersey, USA, Prashant Bhushan has said that India’s judicial system was being dismantled under the current regime by using multiple agencies to create secret dossiers on the judges of the Supreme Court and threatening their children with jail time.
Bhushan was delivering the keynote address at an event hosted by the Indian American Muslim Council (IAMC) on the ‘State of Democracy in India’, on Thursday.
A note issued by the IAMC said that Bhushan had alleged that all agencies - including the Enforcement Directorate, the Central Bureau of Investigation, the Income Tax department, the National Investigation Agency and local police, are being used to create dossiers on every judge who is likely to become chief justice. He alleged the agencies and police have become ‘largely tools of this government.’
He added that judges were told to toe the government’s line, failing which they would be exposed, and their children jailed. Fear, inducements, and obstruction were being used to bend the courts while the Supreme Court was failing to defend its own authority, even as the government routinely violated legal norms around judicial appointments.
Bhushan said this had blocked the selection of ‘some independent judges’, especially those belonging to the minority communities despite the collegium recommending them. He compared the judiciary’s current state to its capitulation during the 1975–77 Emergency, when the Supreme Court infamously held that the right to life could be suspended.
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Beyond the judiciary, Bhushan described a dangerous consolidation of authoritarian power in India as democratic institutions—from constitutional watchdogs to the media—had been systematically undermined and stripped of independence.
He included the Election Commission of India and the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) in the list of those institutions that had bent to the will of the ruling party. Bhushan called for a ‘civic resistance’ to the ruling party’s propaganda machinery.
