Boon or menace?

Prime Minister I K Gujral has voiced
his concern on the growing misuse of
public interest litigations (PIL).
Speaking to the press on May 10,
he expressed the need to initiate
a debate on whether the current
phenomenon of filing PILs have
gone out of hand. He said, -Some
remedies are more dangerous than
the disease." His contention is that
while the concern for fighting corruption is justifiable, rationality
demands that one should not create
"institutions which can be super-judicial bodies". He said, "We should
not reach a stage where the government is run by the courts and not by
the people."

Earlier, former Prime Minister H D
Deve Gowda had also made a similar
statement during a chief ministers'
and power ministers' meet in mid-October 1996; he had said, "Whether
they are public interest litigations or
political interest litigations. I don't
know" (Down To Earth, Vol 5, No 20).

In the course of hearing a petition
filed by Janata Party president
Subramaniam Swamy on April 28, a
Supreme Court bench had also
warned against the misuse of PlLs by
moving different courts on an issue
which was already pending before it.