Independence at any cost. What use is it?

In the last year of its rule the Congress started to draft a bill which would set up a Judicial Appointments Commission to appoint judges to High Courts and Supreme Courts. At present judges are appointed by a Collegium, consisting of judges and presided over by the Chief Justice. This is said to preserve the independence of the judiciary from the executive arm of the government after the depredations wrought by Indira Gandhi who appointed Justice AN Ray as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, superseding 3 senior most judges. There has been much criticism of the Collegium system, because of its secrecy, and recently an article by a retired Supreme Court Judge, Markandey Katju describing how an Additional Judge of the Madras High Court was allowed to continue in office, despite persistent allegations of corruption, has raised the pitch of the debate. This unnamed judge was close to a political party which was a coalition partner of the Congress in the central government and was protected by the intercession of the then Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh. Chief Justices RC Lahoti and YK Sabharwal extended the corrupt judge's appointment while Chief Justice KG Balakrishnan made him permanent but transferred him to another court. Another retired Judge of the Supreme Court, AK Patnaik writes to defend the present Collegium system because," First, primacy of the opinion of the CJI will ensure a judiciary independent from the executive and eliminate political influences, and second, the collegium of the CJI and other judges are best equipped to know and assess the work of the candidate and his appointment as judge to the higher judiciary." Are they? The secrecy of the Collegium gives rise to the suspicion that friends and colleagues will be rewarded at the expense of more knowledgeable and efficient candidates or personal grudge may stop the promotion of an extremely capable judge. Justice Patnaik contradicts himself by writing," Yet many advocates with merit and integrity have been overlooked and those with lesser merit and doubtful integrity have been appointed judges of HCs." Yet he is still able to conclude," Therefore, while we have been able to ensure that judges are independent of the executive, we have not been able to ensure that the best are appointed Judges of the HC and the SC even after 1993." But they are not independent, as the Madras incident has shown, and people with less merit are susceptible to bribes with juicy sinecures after retirement. We can conclude that judges are neither the most worthy nor independent. For us Indians it is not just semantics. We are already suffocating under the jackboots of a corrupt feudal system of government. We should at least be able to obtain some justice from our judges.