The concept of judicial infallibility in India is at stake. J. Jayalalitha is set to return as chief minister of Tamil Nadu. The Karnataka high court has set aside a trial court judgment that held her guilty last year in a disproportionate assets case. Justice C.R Kumaraswami ruled that the prosecution had failed to prove the charges against Jayalalitha and overruled Justice John Michael D’Cunha’s order. One judge proved another wrong. Jayalalitha has been sentenced to four years’ imprisonment and had to resign as CM. the case took 18 years to be decided by the trial court. And now the trial court judgment has been annulled. Jayalalitha had been debarred from electoral politics for over a decade. That was a strong deterrent to the criminalisation of politics. However, in retrospect, the verdict seems to have been hasty. Such action should not have been taken against her before she had exhausted various levels of legal redress. In the past, the High Court had reversed many judgments of lower courts. But the trial court decision was against the chief minister of a state and should have been taken after due deliberation. It is arguable that a person of Jayalalitha’s stature should have been given immunity until a foolproof criminal investigation had been conducted.

On the other hand, there is no denying that there may have been political pressure behind the judicial about-face. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has already offered his greetings to Jayalalitha. It follows a weekend of fellowship in West Bengal where Narendra Modi and chief minister Mamata Banerjee spoke of the virtues of “shoulder to shoulder cooperation for the sake of the country.”  The alliance with the Trinamul Congress and now with the AIADMK is supposed to be due to compulsions in the Rajya Sabha. It is the good old numbers game