"Can't Ask System To Shut Down": Sanjeev Sanyal Responds To TN Bar Council Notice On His Remarks On Long Court Vacations

The Bar Council of Tamil Nadu and Puducherry (BCTNP) issued a notice against Sanjeev Sanyal, a member of the Economic Advisory Council to Prime Minister (EAC-PM), for his remarks on the functioning of courts.

Sanyal on Thursday (30 May) rebutted three points made in this letter in a post on X and highlighted that he is not the only person arguing for legal system reform and the ending of the system of long vacations.

Sanyal agreed to the notice's argument that the bureaucracy is also very inefficient and said that he has been writing about government systems but "this is no justification for keeping legal processes inefficient."

Another argument in the notice was that "contrary to public perception, weekends and vacations are spent writing and correcting the judgments and orders."

Sanyal said that the judges are welcome to take leave like everyone else but there is no reason for the whole system to shut down for weeks and highlighted the hard work done by other members of society.

"We are all participants in building India. No one asks for the system to shut down when they go on vacation," Sanyal said responding to the "fatwa" issued against him.

Sanyal had said that 50 million cases are pending in the judiciary, responding to which the BCTNP had said that 73 per cent of these cases are related to government departments.

On this, Sanyal said that he had heard such statistics thrown around earlier but could not substantiate it with data. He asked the TN Bar Council to give definite data so that something could be done.