IIM admission saga

So where do we stand now? The Supreme Court has advanced the hearing of the constitutional validity of the OBC quota bill to May 8. Does that mean that the matter will be resolved then? Not, if we go by one newspaper report. The report says that the Chief Justice had asked the parties to complete their representations in 10 days' time. That would take the court hearings upto May 18. The SC could conceivably take some time thereafter to give the verdict.

Who will hear the matter now? Will it be the two-judge bench of Pasayat and Panta that stayed the OBC quota or a new bench to be constituted by the CJ? Will that be another two-judge bench or a larger bench for hearing a constitutional matter? We don't know yet.

Now that the court hearings seemed poised to stretch upto late May, it does appear that the HRD ministry will allow the IIMs to release their admission lists as per last year's intake.

There were one or two things about yesterday's proceedings that caught my eye. First, the government seems to have responded deftly to the SC's refusal on April 23 to vacate the stay. The Attorney- General was asked to mention the matter in court when the CJ was presiding. The SC rules do not permit mention of any matter unless it is scheduled but, apparently, there is a provision in the rules that makes an exception in favour of the Attorney-General.

Secondly, there was a rather charged exchange between the counsel for the petitioners and the CJ. Counsel P C Lahoty argued that for the government to mention the matter before the CJ was not in conformity with SC procedures and the matter could mentioned only before the two-judge bench. The CJ asserted that it was his preorogative to decide the date of the hearing. The CJ was quoted as telling Mr Lahoty who had raised his voice, "You may give a speech elsewhere".

Today's Indian Express has an article by Pratap Bhanu Mehta which lambasts the IIMs for caving in to the HRD ministry when the latter issued a directive asking that admissions be put on hold. Mehta thunders, "A terse one-line order issued by a joint secretary of the Government of India was enough to bring India’s mightiest institutions to their knees".

Mehta is getting carried away. The JS's letter mentions that the orders had the approval of the "Competent Authority" (read, minister). In the present framework, the relationship of the IIMs to the HRD ministry is not very different from that of ONGC to the petroleum ministry or the nationalised banks to the finance ministry. As the minister pointed out yesterday, the IIMs may be autonomous but they are not "independent". For the IIMs to defy the order could have been illegal. It hardly behoves such institutions to violate the law.

Incidentally, each week in this long-running saga brings a new twist- you could be watching a TV serial.