NEW DELHI: Did a late night letter on Monday from 20 renowned advocates of Delhi and Mumbai accusing the Supreme Court of exhibiting symptoms of its Emergency-time mindset help change the court’s reluctance to entertain PILs on the plight of migrant workers to take suo motu cognisance of the crisis and seek response from the Centre and states in 48 hours?
The letter signed by 20 advocates, including P Chidambaram, Kapil Sibal, C U Singh, Vikas Singh, Prashant Bhushan, Iqbal Chagla, Aspi Chenoy, Yusuf Muchala and Janak Dwarkadas, said, “As a consequence of the court’s failure to intervene (in March), even though the number of Covid cases were then only a few hundred at the time, the millions of migrant workers were unable to proceed to their hometowns and were compelled to remain in small cramped tenements or rooms or on