One of the features of a modern bourgeois state is the "separation of powers" between the legislature, executive and judiciary, and the scheme of "checks and balances" to allegedly avoid "excesses" by one of them over the other two. Over the years, the credibility of the executive as well as of the legislature has taken a beating as far as the masses of workers and peasants and working people are concerned. On top of this, in recent years, the credibility of the third arm of the state, the judiciary, has also suffered.

This was the apprehension by the President of India herself at an official seminar on judicial reforms held in New Delhi. She said that the judicial machinery of India does not “secure justice to all, (or) stand out as a beacon of truth, faith and hope”.

Participants at the Second National Peoples’ Convention on “The Judiciary and the Poor” organised by the Campaign for Judicial Accountability and Reforms on February 23-24, 2008, related scores of instances which showed that the Presidents’ statement was actually a gross understatement. The judiciary in fact has been functioning in recent times as the most ferocious arm of the bourgeois state.

In cities like Mumbai and Delhi, the judiciary has ordered the demolition of working class slums, often without even giving the affected people a hearing. Public lands which housed mills closed down by capitalists have been sold and handed over to big corporates, in full violation of the conditions under which they were leased out in the first place. The rights of workers rendered jobless and the people at large who actually were supposed to own the land have been mercilessly negated by judges upholding the interests of big capitalists and corporates.

Productive rural communities, tribals and peasants displaced by big dams and projects have been reduced to paupers and refugees in their own country overnight by judges who did not enforce the duty of the state to rehabilitate them or uphold their basic right to livelihood. Colonial forest laws were enacted to corner timber and other resources for the colonialists. Today, an “empowered committee” appointed by no less an authority than the Supreme Court merrily grants mining rights to discredited corporates like Sterlite, overriding the rights of thousands of people earning their livelihood in the forests, and also the concerns about devastation of the environment.

When big corporates have demanded that labour laws must be “flexible”, that is permit hire and fire without any responsibility on the part of the capitalist employers; legislatures have hesitated to enact such laws in the face of mass opposition of workers and working people. No such compunctions bind the higher judiciary. The rights won by workers and trade unions through decades of struggles have been negated by the judiciary through mere strokes of their pens, in a series of judgements in recent times. Those who question the functioning of the state can be incarcerated for months on end without bail, as the Supreme Court has shown in recent cases involving civil rights activists whose mere "crime" is the espousal of the rights of the oppressed!

The functioning of the judiciary as a ferocious arm of the bourgeois state needs to be seen in the context of the thrust of the ruling class to turn India into an imperialist power. The struggles of the working class in earlier decades had led to the enactment of some laws that granted labour rights. Even though these largely remained on paper and were very difficult for the working people to get implemented, today the bourgeoisie wants to completely do away with them. Negating them through the legislative process is obviously likely to backfire on the electoral fortunes of the political parties which push for such “reforms”. The higher judiciary, on the other hand, has been steadily evolved as a body which appoints and controls itself free of legislative or popular controls and since it is wholly unaccountable to the people, is best suited at this time to overturn such laws through judicial decrees.

The participants at the Peoples’ Convention on "The Judiciary and the Poor" concluded that “it is clear, that no amount of tinkering with the present system is likely to yield significant results. Drastic surgery is required”. It called for a powerful peoples’ movement throughout the country to ensure that the system is in fact changed in favour of the people.