Supreme Court to the rescue

A Mature democracy should work through political consensus, not judicial fiat. The fact that it took a Supreme Court directive for resident doctors to call off their 19-day strike is, therefore, disturbing. Conciliatory overtures by senior government functionaries had, clearly, failed to convince the doctors. That indicates a serious crisis of political legitimacy. The judiciary accomplished what was, by all accounts, a political task. Its emphasis that the patients’ right to be treated is paramount, and that it cannot be subservient to other concerns has, however, rightly delegitimised medical and paramedical workers’ right to strike. The doctors would have surely seen public support for their agitation wane if they had decided to persist in the face of such severe judicial injunction. It would, however, be ingenuous to attribute that solely to the high level of trust the higher judiciary enjoys. The threat of contempt of court certainly made the apex court’s directive more authoritative. Any which way, the sequence of events does not bode well for democracy. The political class should realise that suo motu judicial interventions to rectify such distortions is the consequence of political failure.
Continual disruption of existing social consensus, which has clearly happened in case of reservation, is integral to democratic evolution. But it’s for the political process to maintain dialogue between various constituents of society. It’s the job of the political class to mediate between various sections of society, and between society and the state. Lawmaking is meant to flow out of such engagement. The government failed to persuade the doctors to return because the latter could not trust the various promises made to them. There was clearly a gap between these promises and its subsequent moves. The subtly casteist terms of the current anti-reservation stir, which has sought to articulate genuine concerns, underscores a serious political failure. The political class has failed to evolve a politics that would make primitive social identities redundant. It’s time that changed.

--The Economic Times Editorial