The Supreme Court on Tuesday said that it cannot run the country by micromanaging every aspect of governance, the Hindustan Times reported.
Chief Justice DY Chandrachud said that such an approach could render the court dysfunctional.
The comments were made in response to an intervention application seeking action to prevent the deaths of captive elephants in Kerala.
Chandrachud remarked that there had been a proliferation of such applications in cases pending before the Supreme Court, Bar and Bench reported. He asked Senior Advocate CU Singh, who was representing the applicant, why he could not approach the Kerala High Court instead.
“This issue deals with local issues…the High Court judges understand local conditions and if the High Court makes an egregious error, then we can look into it,” Chandrachud said. “But how do we run the country like this?”
In response, Singh told the court that a larger batch of petitions pertaining to the matter was pending before the Supreme Court. He said that 135 elephants have died in captivity in the southern state between 2018 and 2022.
The chief justice, however, noted that the High Court has “seasoned judges” who could hear the case. “Now we cannot entertain everything here to make the Supreme Court dysfunctional,” he said, according to Bar and Bench.
However, the court ultimately agreed to hear the intervention application when the main matter comes up before the bench. The case is slated to be heard next in the first week of December.
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