Inviting judicial overreach

We repeatedly see that the court is being asked to rule on what are essentially political disputes.

The three branches of the government function through a system of check and balance. When one of the executive, the legislative or the judicial branches exceeds its bounds, the others remind it of its constitutional limits. In the post-1990 democratic setup, the judiciary for one has by and large played a positive role in upholding democratic values that had repeatedly come under assault, particularly by the executives who refused to accept any limits on their powers. Yet of late some questionable verdicts of the top court in the country have raised the spectre of a ‘judicial supremacy’. On May 3, a division bench of the Supreme Court raised many eyebrows when it ruled that the Speaker of the Gandaki Provincial assembly should not be counted as an assembly member in the government formation process. So, in the 60-member assembly, even 30 members could constitute a majority. Back in March 2021, in a highly unanticipated decision, deciding what was essentially a petition challenging the party’s name, the court dissolved the ruling Nepal Communist Party. A couple of months later, the court even appointed Sher Bahadur Deuba the new prime minister.