Union Law Minister Kiren Rijiju placed the political resolution at the BJP’s National Executive on Monday in Delhi, in a sign of his rising stature in the party at a time when he has been very vocal on the issue of a reform in the Supreme Court’s collegium system.
This also came on a day when it was reported that Rijiju has written a letter to the Chief Justice of India suggesting that government representatives be included in the Supreme Court created collegium as a move towards restructuring the Memorandum of Procedure (MoP) of the collegium system. Rijiju has repeatedly called for an urgent reform in the collegium system, saying the current system is responsible for the huge pendency of cases.
Union Home Minister Amit Shah had placed the political resolution at the last BJP National Executive in Hyderabad on July 2-3, 2022. Before that, in November 2021, when BJP’s National Executive was held in Delhi, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath had placed the political resolution of the party. This was just before the all-important state elections in Uttar Pradesh in March 2022 which the BJP later won with a thumping majority.
BJP’s move to get the UP CM to place the political resolution had reinforced CM Yogi’s importance and also silenced murmurs over the point whether the party was fully backing him before the UP elections. In 2017 and 2018, senior BJP leader and then Home Minister Rajnath Singh had placed the political resolutions at the BJP National Executive meetings.
Rijiju on Collegium System and Nehru’s mistakes
In July 2021, Rijiju was ‘promoted’ to the full-time Cabinet Minister as he took charge of the Ministry of Law and Justice. He was earlier the Minister of State (Independent Charge) of Youth Affairs and Sports and before that served as a Minister of State, Home Affairs, in the first term of the Modi government. As Law Minister, since last year, Rijiju has been critical of the collegium system and stressing that the government has a right to appoint judges.
Last month, Rijiju told the Rajya Sabha that the Centre has received representations from diverse sources on lack of transparency, objectivity and social diversity in the collegium system of appointment of judges to the Constitutional Courts. In November, Rijju said the collegium system is opaque and claimed that the majority of the judges also believe so. The Supreme Court had then expressed reservation about the law minister’s comments where he criticised the Collegium system.
Rijiju has also been critical of Jawaharlal Nehru’s handling of the Kashmir issue as the Prime Minister. In a piece he wrote exclusively for News18 in October, Rijiju narrated the “Nehru’s 5 Blunders on Kashmir” and said the Congress and its ruling dynasty puts Jawaharlal Nehru, and the later members of the dynasty, first and India later.
“A historical lie has been perpetrated for the past seven decades that Kashmir was also among the princely states that created problems on joining India. As documents now reveal, it was Nehru who created these problems and not Maharaja Hari Singh,” wrote Rijiju.
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