Solomon’s calling

The fuss over whether the chief justice of the Madras high court should have invited Ms Jayalalithaa to tea to celebrate the start of her current chief ministership raises questions of propriety and protocol that are generally either ignored in India or taken a shade too far.
The second occurred to me recently because of the consternation when I asked a Calcutta high court judge, a newfound kinsman, for his card.

He had been good enough to seek me out to establish the connection and I wanted to identify him in our clan chronicle. The people surrounding him were aghast at my effrontery. Not for them the self-deprecation of the late P.V. Narasimha Rao, who told me once that “as a lover of anonymity” he had never had a card. These lawyers seemed to regard a card as sacrilege. But the judge himself, a pleasant and modest man, explained that only Calcutta high court judges don’t have cards. Other courts aren’t as restrictive.
The ban — if it exists — is based on an Asian misunderstanding of an Anglo-Saxon social convention. I say Asian because the late J.B. Jeyaretnam, then Singapore’s sole Opposition MP, was also outraged at my request for a card. As a barrister trained in London, he told me peremptorily and quite unnecessarily, he didn’t advertise himself.
He was thinking of what my father used to call a tradesman’s card, a printed piece of pasteboard with professional and contact details. That is what almost everyone today means by a card. But as a barrister, Jeyaretnam should have known of a visiting (or calling) card with just his name engraved in fine copperplate script from, yes, an actual copper plate. I still have the one my father had made for me when I was going to England to study, and perhaps a few of the yellowed cards engraved from it.
The ritual was to “leave cards” — as the phrase went — on superiors. Every bungalow in, say, Meerut Cantonment sported a Not-at-home Box such as the one my grandmother had — rather like a squat letterbox in smooth well-finished teak — in which newcomers and juniors were supposed to drop their cards and wait for an invitation.
I remember being very impressed by a variant of the practice in Kalimpong when I first visited Kazini Elisa-Maria Dorji Khangsarpa of Chakung. Delhi old-timers might remember her as Mrs Ethel Maud Langford-Rae, French teacher and governess to the Nepalese ambassador’s children. The Dalai Lama’s card on a silver salver implied that His Holiness had called but, of course, he had done no such thing. Kazini was nothing if not resourceful and had put out the card — it may have accompanied a book — to impress innocents.
I stopped using my copperplate cards when people asked for my telephone number and address. Later came fax, email and mobile details. Cards have acquired a commercial vitality and I have sat through innumerable business lunches in Singapore where each new arrival’s first task is to distribute his card to all the others. There is no graciousness about this handing out of self-propaganda by people who are open to receiving commissions and contracts. So Jeyaretnam’s reticence or the Calcutta high court ban were not without logic. A judge’s card on display can also create the wrong impression.
Discretion is all the more necessary now that the judiciary seems to be taking over India’s governance. But cards and tea parties are not the only ways of influencing judges. Some judges have their little vanities. One took her resplendent chaprasi to cocktail parties. Another liked being called Your Lordship all the time. Some judges have their not-so-little expectations. What matters is the man (or woman) under the wig and gown, not the appearance, which can be deceptive.
Nirad C. Chaudhuri mentions an eminent judge who went to court exceptionally early so that his father, a minor court employee, didn’t have to stand up for him. I knew of a judge who was drinking as a hotelier’s guest on a dry day (violating both prohibition laws and professional ethics!) when he was suddenly summoned to swear in an acting governor. Yet, such was his reputation for integrity that a leading national politician flew across the country to be served with a writ in his jurisdiction.
As the Lokpal Bill debate demonstrates, we can make a fetish of form. India has been arguing for years about judicial performance commissions, independent complaints boards and codes of conduct. A draft Judges Standards and Accountability Bill is expected to replicate most of the Supreme Court’s 16-point Restatement of Values of Judicial Life.
The charter doesn’t seem to mention tea parties or cards, but its comments about holding stocks and shares took me back to Indira Gandhi’s defiant declamation at the Shah Commission. Some judges opposed her, she claimed, because she had taken action against their shareholdings, provoking a red-faced Justice J.C. Shah to burst out angrily that he had never held any shares. Mrs Gandhi replied sweetly she hadn’t mentioned him.
It’s just as well, perhaps, that the proposed charter bans gifts and hospitality, forbids running for office in clubs, and “close association” with lawyers, even to the extent of not allowing relatives in the Bar to live in the same house. Apart from specific bans, the overall effect might be to create a model of rectitude and act as a deterrent. But laws alone won’t create an army of Solomons if confusion and corruption dominate the lower rungs of a creaky judicial and law enforcement system whose policemen have been called criminals in uniform.
I recall a judge’s peon once rushing up to demand baksheesh because my family had won a property suit. Seeing my amazement that this should happen in full court, my lawyer said: “Don’t worry, in a few years the judge himself will make the demand!”
Mercifully, that hasn’t happened yet. But forbidding cards and tea parties alone isn’t going to prevent it either until the whole hierarchy is cleansed.

The author is a senior journalist who contributes to several top international publications