NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Monday told the Jammu and Kashmir National Panthers Party that the judiciary was not in a position to deal with all the dimensions of the unrest in the state and it should rather be dealt politically while advising the party to approach the Centre for it.
“Political leaders are meeting the Prime Minister. You also join them,” a bench headed by Chief Justice T S Thakur asked Panthers Party chief and senior counsel Bhim Singh, who was pleading for the court’s intervention for restoring normalcy in the state. Singh pleaded that the Centre had not invited him for consultations “as the RSS hates me”. The bench then took serious exception to his remarks and directed him to keep politics out of court proceedings.
Solicitor-General Ranjit Kumar said the Centre had not invited any political leader. Party leaders from the state had taken the initiative of approaching the Prime Minister. The SG said he would personally speak to the Union Home Secretary and arrange a meeting the Prime Minister and Singh. However, the court kept the Panthers Party’s petition alive and asked Singh to file his response in two weeks to the Centre’s status report on the situation in the Kashmir Valley.
On July 29, the court had rejected the party’s main plea for placing the state under governor’s rule and sought a status report on the law-and-order situation there.
As the bench was not inclined to entertain the PIL petition, Singh had pleaded that the judiciary had the primary responsibility to ensure that the people of the state were not denied their fundamental right to life due to the non-availability of food, medicine and essential services.