Justice Markandey Katju, India’s retired supreme court judge, in his recent article has termed everyone in Pakistan as a looter including the politicians, the army and the religious leaders. “Imran Khan, the prime minister, who, in his quest for power, abandoned all his professed principles; both main opposition parties-the PPP and the PML (N)-who looted the country for decades-and religious bigots like Maulana Fazlur Rahman, the chairman of the Jamaat Ulema-e-Islam (F) a thug and rank opportunist, who can sink to any level in his quest to become prime minister of Pakistan”, he wrote in ‘the Week). He also referred to the report that in 2007, Maulana Fazlur Rehman pleaded with the then US ambassador to Pakistan to help him in that quest. This is unbecoming of man who was once chief justice of India.
In February 2019, he was all praise for Imran Khan and Pakistani nation for showing maturity and cool temperament. But when he received threats and was asked to migrate to Pakistan by Hindu extremists for praising Pakistan and its Prime Minister Imran Khan, he started badmouthing Pakistan and its leadership. He is either a coward or mentally imbalanced man, as once he appreciated Imran Khan and latter called him a fraud. Earlier, he had been critical of Indian government. Last month, he said: “India has sowed the seeds for large-scale guerilla war in occupied Kashmir by stripping the territory of its special status. “Those who are today gloating over their great victory’ of abolishing Article 370 will soon wake up to a nightmare once body bags start coming back in large numbers from Kashmir, like what the Americans saw return from Vietnam”, he added.
He had said: “Remove the restrictions, and popular protests will engulf the whole valley. Continue them, and the pot will boil until it explodes. As is said in Hindi, the situation is such that ‘na nigalte bane, na ugalte bane’ (one can neither swallow it, nor vomit it).” In 2016, Katju had stirred another controversy by calling Mother Teresa unscientific and a buffoon. Mother Teresa, Zakir Naik, Syed Ali Shah Geelani, Pravin Togadia, Sadhvi Prachi, Adityanath, etc, are all different sides of the same coin – unscientific, feudal-minded religious fundamentalist and fanatic buffoons,” he wrote. When a reader objected to putting Teresa in the same vein as Zakir Naik and Adityanath, Katju wrote: “Get me 10 million dollars from shady people, and I will also serve humanity.”
In a Facebook post in 2015, Katju had claimed “Mahatma Gandhi was a British agent who did great harm to India”, drawing the ire of many angry Indians. His remarks were not limited to Gandhi, as he called Rabindranath Tagore a “loyal British stooge” and Subhas Chandra Bose “an agent of the Japanese fascist imperialists.” He had eventually apologised for his remarks. Katju was even dragged to court; however, the case was later dismissed. When Katju used derogatory remarks for India’s heroes, he was dubbed by many as a person of unsound mind. On his remarks about repression in Kashmir, we in Pakistan had appreciated him, forgetting that he continued changing his position on many issues.
