 Thank you very much and again, thank you very much for the honour of being here and especially to Ms Indira Jaisingh who is an inspiration to us all, always, but again has taken the leadership at a very crucial point in the history of our country. I'm following a most inspiring speech, missed by Mr Bhattacharya and a most informative speech by Mr Chibber and so I have a very tough act to follow. I'll just, and time is very short so I'll just make a couple of points. First I think the first point, I was just reading the other day actually by coincidence a 2018 Vanderbilt Law Review interesting article based on extensive research of the evolution of judicial independence and various safeguards for judicial independence in the United States and with lots of facts, historical facts, the conclusion that the article reaches is that judicial independence and safeguards similar to judicial independence in the judiciary are political constructions created by democratic movements in the United States. So they asked the question why 75 years ago, even 50 years ago, it was not unthinkable for leading politicians in the United States to say we want to influence judges, we want to walk into judges and tell them what to decide, we want to pack the benches, but today even Trump cannot say that in public. So how did that change come about? It is not because of laws written in the Constitution, but because of democratic movements, political movements that changed the public awareness and public opinions and created safeguards for the judiciary. So what this article argues is that judicial independence is actually a political construction of political movements. And so perhaps a title, this is a wonderful title, but if you flip this around, what we should really be discussing is what are the implications for judicial independence from democracy. Because it is democracy that is a mother and judicial independence is a child. I went these four heroes and I think I would put one as the hero, heroist of them all. Justice H. R. Khanna level sort of commitment to principle where he put here, he has put online knowingly the possibility of becoming Chief Justice of India, Justice Gogoi. I also agree that I know some of them, Justice Lokul was one year junior to me at the Campus Law Center in Delhi, I know him from those days. And Justice Joseph is from my state in Kerala, we all know him extremely well. Justice Gogoi, of course, and Justice Chalamesh were also all of them, people of exceptional integrity and exceptional experience and exceptional insight and exceptional competence, not just integrity, but competence as well. When the four of them come together, not people who seek publicity, not people who sought the spotlight, and deliver an apocalyptic message to us that judicial independence has been compromised, that democracy is in danger and most importantly that they, the senior most judges of the country are helpless and they appeal to the people to save the nation. I think we may have been living and Ms. Jai Singh was on behalf of all of us, a witness to the event and even comparable to the Last Supper, a very dire warning that what is weakened is not judicial independence, but democracy is dying in this country. And it is because democracy is dying in this country that judicial independence has become feeble, not the other way around. And yes, many of us as lawyers and law academics and judges often claim that it is the judiciary that protects democracy. The truth is exactly the opposite. It is democracy that has created even the idea of a judiciary. And what a brilliant idea to spin off from the monarch, simply the power of adjudication, the power to punish, the power to determine rights and liabilities, spin it off, peel it off from the monarch, put it in the hands of some courtiers of the monarch initially, and gradually take that forward, build many constraints, many limits on power, many constraints on power, and democratize the judicial function, which was once part of the monarchy. It's a great triumph of common people and their struggles to establish democracy. And so what we witnessed on January 18th, I think an event of extraordinary significance, which may or may not have inspired another event that took place in Manila, Mr. Chibber must know about it, where there is a huge controversy about the current Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. And several sitting judges came out in public, including several sitting Supreme Court judges and asked for her to resign. And I wonder whether they were inspired by the January 12th, 2018 press conference in India. Having, I think, a worldwide effect. So the only point I want to make in this limited time is that we must understand that the world has seen a long struggle to democratize what we today call judicial power, which was once an arbitrary power vested in the monarch indistinguishable from any other power. In other countries in the world, and there's no time to go much further into this, they not only develop the idea of an independent judiciary, but they also shaped and molded the ideas of judicial independence and created the idea of the rule of law and linked these two to democracy. And even more recently, as Anand and Ms. Jai Singh and Mr. Anand Grover and Ms. Brinda Grover here know extremely well. They have consciously, especially over the last 20 or 25 years, very deliberately and successfully linked the idea of rule of law and judicial independence beyond mere formality to bring into it a core of commitment to fundamental rights. And so today, starting from Dawkin, they've argued that the rule of law is not simply a formal process. At the heart of it is an uncompromising commitment, a non-negotiable commitment to the idea of equality and freedom and democracy. So we have seen how democracy has created the judicial power, has molded its content, shaped its content to actually safeguard human freedom and human equality at the core. And in the process, they have also over the last maybe 200 years democratized the judiciary also, not only created the judiciary, but democratized it through things like the jury system. Lord Devlin, for example, said in the context of the United Kingdom, that if a dictator took over power in England, not a hypothetical situation in our country anymore, but if a dictator took over power in England, the first thing he would do would be to shut down parliament. That's not a necessary thing we have to worry about. It's already shut down in our country. The second thing that the dictator would do is to shut down the jury system because he said the jury system is the lamp that tells us that freedom is alive, that a common people have the sovereign power once exercised by the monarch to punish. So they democratized it through the jury system. They democratized the way in which judges are selected. Today a judge of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom is selected on the basis of an application. Those who apply are called to an interview. They are interviewed and after the interview they have to write a written test. Then they have to do a moot court and then there are appointed Supreme Court judges. We know the system of the United States because they realize that it matters to the country who you put in these high offices. I think today if it is true that judicial independence is compromised, there is no doubt that this is the single biggest security threat to this country. It is shocking that two months after the senior most judges of this country have said and identified what is the biggest security threat to this country through which any enemy of India if there are enemies of India can capture policy making and law making in this country and the executive doesn't react, the judiciary doesn't react and there is no reaction from the media. Everyone ignores it and that shows that the other so-called security threats they put before us are completely fake security threats because they are refusing to respond to a genuine security threat in this country and therefore what I am suggesting the point I want to make is that the democratic movements in this country have become weak. The success that other countries have had to democratize their judiciary has not succeeded in our country. We know for many years not now that all is not well with the judiciary but we have not found a way to solve those problems and I think what we should celebrate is that these four judges have put before us a new instrument to reform the judiciary and that new instrument is to use the power of democracy as an instrument of judicial reform and I will just conclude in a minute by this example that just a few days before January 18th in the latter part of December a woman judge in the UK filed a case before the employment, what happened in December was a Court of Appeals decision in the UK but a few months before that a woman judge in the UK filed a petition before the employment tribunal claiming protection under the Whistleblower Protection Act because she had criticized the judiciary in writing openly and faced retaliation from senior judges and some senior judges who examined what she had said said that her attack was a very fundamental attack on the judiciary and she felt she had been retaliated against and she went to the employment tribunal and she said I want protection as a whistleblower. She was a district judge appointed under warrant signed by the Queen after this reform so comparable to a High Court and Supreme Court judge. So the employment tribunal said you are not a worker, you are holding office under the terms of appointment of the Queen, you are not a worker and therefore you are not entitled to protection under the Whistleblower Protection Act. She appealed to the Court of Appeals and in the Court of Appeals in December a few days before these judges spoke out accepted that she is a whistleblower but not entitled to protection under the Employment Tribunal Act because she is not a worker, she is a judge appointed by the Queen but she is entitled under the terms of her appointment as a judge she is entitled to whistleblower protection including compensation for retaliation. So I think that's why I was discussing with Ms. Jasing, we must recognize that these four judges have set a new standard for whistleblower protection in our country. They have spoken openly and no whistleblower in this country in any office in any function today can receive lesser protection and lesser space for internal criticism than these judges have and I think the power of insiders speaking out is an extremely powerful instrument for democracy and I feel that what we should do now is to use this opportunity, this opening of democratization, democratic speech by insiders using whistleblower rights as an important opportunity to start a campaign to democratize the judiciary and apply democratic principles in the judiciary selection process. This is a controversial thing to say but I am in favor of introducing the jury system into this country with safeguards, we discuss how it happens but we have to bring the voice, democracy means Kratos power is in the hands of the people, we have to bring the voice and power of common people into the judicial system at different levels and then I think we would have taken full advantage of this development of which we witnessed on January 18th and I think we would be able to strengthen, use democracy to strengthen the judiciary and through that to safeguard our democracy as well, thank you very much.