Respect to the court has to be commanded and not demanded and it is not enhanced by summoning officers, the Supreme Court Friday said while deprecating the practice of certain high courts to call officers at the drop of the hat.
Observing that by these orders the line of separation of powers between judiciary and executive is sought to be crossed, the apex court also referred to an earlier judgement on separation of powers in which it had observed that judges must know their limits. They must have modesty and humility, and not behave like emperors.
The observations deprecating the practice of summoning senior officers to the court came in a judgement by which a bench comprising of Justice S K Kaul and Justice Hemant Gupta set aside the verdicts of a single and division benches of Allahabad High Court’s Lucknow bench in a service matter.
The high court had ordered the Uttar Pradesh government to calculate and pay 50 per cent of the back wages to doctor Manoj Kumar Sharma who did not join his place of work at Badaun for 13 long years in the state after being transferred on March 6, 2002 from a place in Uttarakhand. Justice Gupta, writing the judgement for the bench, said A practice has developed in certain High Courts to call officers at the drop of a hat and to exert direct or indirect pressure.
The line of separation of powers between Judiciary and Executive is sought to be crossed by summoning the officers and in a way pressurizing them to pass an order as per the whims and fancies of the Court. The presence of public officers comes at the cost of other official engagements demanding their attention, it said, adding sometimes, the officers even have to travel long distances, it said.
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