Convict Sanjaay Dutt talks morality

Sanjay Dutt: Pawn-who-would-be-Queen

Cine star Sanjay Dutt, convicted in the 1993 serial bomb blasts in Mumbai and now general secretary of the Samajwadi Party, crossed the limits of normal and political decency by insinuating that Law Minister Hansraj Bharadwaj was responsible for the Supreme Court decision to deny him permission to contest the Lok Sabha elections.

So grave are the implications of his virtual challenge to the ruling dispensation and judicial independence, that Chief Justice of India, Mr. KG Balakrishnan, had to take the utterly unprecedented step of formally and personally denying the allegations.

While it is debatable if the Chief Justice of India should himself have issued the denial, the fact that the Supreme Court as an institution felt pained and compelled to do so, has taken us to a new low in public life. Possibly the Honourable Court felt that the Law Minister’s admission that he received Sanjay Dutt at his residence on 30 March after Dutt alleged that he had a ‘sting’ CD, cast a shadow over judicial probity and independence. Whichever way one looks at it – a convict on bail has thrown mud at one of the high institutions of the land, and he has dared to do so only because he is politically well-connected and well-heeled.