IMPORTANT POINTS
Refrain and restrain are the essential virtues in the arena of adjudication.
Matter disposed of in terms of earlier directions in another writ petition in which the main aggrieved party was not impleaded. The decision cannot bind such party.
High Court cannot direct conduct of census operations in a particular manner.
High Court directing caste wise census without having a lis in that regard before it is beyond jurisdiction and wholly unsustainable.
High Court repeating direction in another case without any kind of deliberation is wholly unsustainable.

JUDGMENT

Dipak Misra, J.

The present appeal depicts and, in a way, sculpts the non-acceptance of conceptual limitation in every human sphere including that of adjudication. No adjudicator or a Judge can conceive the idea that the sky is the limit or for that matter there is no barrier or fetters in one’s individual perception, for judicial vision should not be allowed to be imprisoned and have the potentiality to cover celestial zones. Be it ingeminated, refrain and restrain are the essential virtues in the arena of adjudication because they guard as sentinel so that virtuousness is constantly sustained. Not for nothing, centuries back Francis Bacon[BACON, Essays: Of Judicature in I The Works of Francis Bacon (Montague, Basil, Esq. ed., Philadelphia: A Hart, late Carey & Hart, 1852), pp. 58-59.] had to say thus:-

“Judges ought to be more learned than witty, more reverend than plausible, and more advised than confident. Above all things, integrity is their portion and proper virtue......Let the judges also remember that Solomon’s throne was supported by lions on both sides: let them be lions, but yet lions under the throne.”

2. Almost half a century back Frankfurter, J.[ FRANKFURTEER, Felix in Clark, Tom C., “ Mr. Justice Frankfurter: ‘A Heritage for all Who Love the Law’” 51 A.B.A.J. 330, 332 (1965) ] sounded a note of caution:-

“For the Highest exercise of judicial duty is to subordinate one’s personal pulls and one’s views to the law of which we are all guardians-those impersonal convictions that make a society a civilized community, and not the victims of personal rule.”

3. In this context, it is seemly to reproduce the warning of Benjamin N. Cardozo in The Nature of the Judicial process[Yale University Press 1921 Edn., Pg- 114] which rings of poignant and inimitable expression:-

“The Judge even when he is free, is still not wholly free. He is not to innovate at pleasure. He is not a knight errant roaming at will in pursuit of his own ideal of beauty or of goodness. He is to draw his inspiration from consecrated principles. He is not to yield to spasmodic sentiment, to vague and unregulated benevolence. He is to exercise a discretion informed by tradition, methodized by analogy, disciplined by system, and subordinated to ‘the primordial necessity of order in social life’.”

4. In Tata Cellular V. Union of India (1994) 6 SCC 651, while dealing with the concept of judicial review, this Court referred to a passage worded by Chief Justice Neely, which is as follows:-

‘I have very few illusions about my own limitations as a judge and from those limitations I generalize to the inherent limitations of all appellate courts reviewing rate cases. It must be remembered that this Court sees approximately 1262 cases a year with five judges. I am not an accountant, electrical engineer, financier, banker, stock broker, or systems management analyst. It is the height of folly to expect judges intelligently to review a 5000 page record addressing the intricacies of public utility operation.’

5. The fundamental intention of referring to the aforesaid statements may at various times in the history of law is to recapitulate basic principles that have to be followed by a Judge, for certain sayings at times become necessitous to be told and re-narrated. The present case exposits such a situation, a sad one.

6. The chronology has its own relevance in the instant case. One Dr. E. Sayedah preferred W.P No. 25785 of 2005 in the High Court of Madras for issue of a writ of certiorari for quashment of the order passed by the Central Administrative Tribunal in O.A. No.3/2002 on the foundation that when there is no Scheduled Tribe population in the Union Territory of Pondicherry and there is no Presidential notification under Article 342 of the Constitution of India there cannot be any reservation for Scheduled Tribe in the said Union Territory and, therefore, the appointment of the applicant in the Original Application who was appointed solely on the base