By IANS
New Delhi : The Supreme Court Thursday asked high courts across the country to curb their tendency to summon government officials “at the drop of a hat” merely for “ego satisfaction of judges”.
A bench of Justices A.K. Mathur and Markandey Katju issued the direction, while severely ticking off Justice R.S. Garg of Gujarat High Court, who had summoned the state’s chief secretary and law secretary to explain the lack of sufficient stenographers in the office of the state public prosecutor.
The court found that the judge had summoned the chief secretary on several occasions on flimsy grounds.
“A large number of cases have come up before this court where we find that judges of various high courts have been summoning the chief secretary, secretaries to the state and the central government, director generals of police, director, CBI or Boarder Security Force or other senior officials of the government,” the bench said.
“There is no doubt that the high court has power to summon these officials, but that should be done in very rare and exceptional cases when there are compelling circumstances to do so,” it said in a seven-page ruling.
“Such summoning orders should not be passed lightly or as a routine or at the drop of a hat,” the bench added.
“We are constrained to make these observations because we are coming across a large number of cases where such orders summoning of high officials are being passed by the high courts and often it is nothing but for the ego satisfaction of the judge,” the court said.
Asking judges “to have modesty and humility”, the also told them to “realise that summoning a senior official, except in some very rare and exceptional situation, and that too for compelling reasons, is counter productive and may also involve heavy expenses and valuable time of the official concerned”.
“The judiciary must have respect for the executive and the legislature.
“Judges should realize that senior officials are extremely busy persons who are often working from morning till night. No doubt, the ministers lay down the policy, but the actual implementation of the policy and day to day running of the government has to be done by the bureaucrats, and hence the bureaucrats are often working round the clock,” the court said.
“If they are summoned by the court they will, of course, appear before it, but then a lot of public money and time may be unnecessarily wasted,” it added.
“Sometimes high court judges in far off places summon high officials like CBI Director or Union Home Secretary not realizing that it entails heavy expenditure like arranging of a BSF aircraft, coupled with public money and valuable time which would have been otherwise spent on public welfare,” the bench said.
“Frequent, casual and lackadaisical summoning of high officials by the court cannot be appreciated,” it said, while ordering circulation of this ruling in all high courts.
“We are constrained to make these observations because we are coming across a large number of cases where such orders summoning of high officials are being passed by the high courts and often it is nothing but for the ego satisfaction of the judge,” the court said.