Justice Markandey Katju is visibly annoyed with me. He has agreed to an interview after a lot of persuasion. Then, a short while before I am to meet him, he has called me up to tell me to read a piece by him published in a national newspaper that day. Yet here I am, at his residence in the leafy environs of Lutyens’ Delhi, and I have come without reading the aforementioned piece.

I try to explain why, but Katju thrusts the paper at me and gruffly tells me to go through the article. I read it, feeling like an admonished schoolgirl, and let out a silent groan. The interview will not go well, I fear.

But my apprehension turns out to be completely unfounded. The chairman of the Press Council of India and former Supreme Court judge, Katju, 67, who is wont to cause a kerfuffle or two with his blunt, often controversial statements, looks and acts crotchety. But in reality, he is as rational as can be. Indeed, whether he talks about the state of the Indian media or why he considers 90 per cent of Indians to be fools, most of his statements are backed by arguments that are hard to refute.

And, yes, he sheds that gruffness too along the way. In the end we argue amicably over whether Rabindranath Tagore or Saratchandra Chattopadhyay was the greater writer. And whether art should be for art’s sake or should have a social message. But that, as they say, is another story.

Right now Katju is immersed in the task of setting up an NGO called The Court of Last Resort. To be launched in Delhi tomorrow, the organisation is the happy fallout of the furore over his appeal for a pardon for Sanjay Dutt in the 1993 bomb blast case. “People asked me why I was pleading his cause when there were thousands languishing in jails without trial or because they may have been wrongly accused,” says Katju, settling his towering, 6-foot-4 frame into a sofa.

He felt that his critics had a point. “The unfortunate fact in our country is that justice is often not done,” he says. “The courts are overburdened. There are 30 million cases pending in the lower courts, the bulk of them criminal cases, and these take years and years to be decided. People, especially those belonging to the minority community, are often picked up on suspicion and held without trial. Who will restore the lost years of their lives?”

He remembered reading Erle Stanley Gardner’s book, The Court of Last Resort, 45 years ago. Gardner, an American criminal lawyer (who also wrote the Perry Mason novels), had set up an organisation by the same name in 1948 to investigate cases of miscarriage of justice. Katju got the idea that a similar outfit could come to the aid of those who were rotting in jails here in India.

It was an altruistic concept, but he moved fast to give it form and shape. Chaired by eminent jurist Fali Nariman, and with Katju as its patron, once launched, The Court of Last Resort will examine cases of injustice either of its own accord or on the representation of someone. It will have state units too. It’s going to be a mammoth task, Katju says ruminatively, and “only honest, upright people and lovers of liberty will be taken on board”.

Indeed, talking to Katju, one cannot help but be struck by the altruism of some of his ideas. Take his views on the India media, which he has observed particularly closely since he took over as chairman of the Press Council in October 2011.

“India has huge socio-economic problems,” he says. “Eighty per cent of our people are poor, 48 per cent of our children are malnourished, we have poor healthcare, education is in a shambles, there’s casteism, communalism, sky-rocketing prices…

“These are the real issues. But very often what we see in the media and the TV screens are film stars, cricketers, fashion parades… There’s commercialisation and sensationalism everywhere. Doesn’t this divert the attention of the people from the real problems facing our country?”

But what’s media to do if this is what the public wants? And this is what sells?

“People want to see half-naked women, so you’ll keep on showing half-naked women the whole day,” Katju asks testily.

Since India is going through a transitional phase, struggling to become a fully industrialised society, he feels that the media’s role is critical. “It can either pander to the cheap tastes of the masses or it can raise their intellectual level and make the masses part of an enlightened India. Just as great thinkers of the 18th century like Rousseau, Voltaire, Thomas Paine and others did in their time.”

That may sound too idealistic in the current scenario. But Katju is known to have a strong social conscience and many of his statements and views emanate from that. In fact, during his 20-year career as a judge, he gave several progressive judgments such as advocating passive euthanasia in case of patients in a permanently vegetative state, recommending the abolition of attempted suicide being treated as a criminal offence, the rehabilitation of sex workers, or recommending the harshest punishment for perpetrators of honour killing.

Naturally, Katju also has a vision for the body he helms now. The Press Council needs punitive powers to pull any real weight, he feels. “At present, it only has the power to censure and admonish. But who cares for that today?”

He makes the point that if doctors and lawyers found guilty of misconduct can have their licences suspended or cancelled, if judges can be impeached, it stands to reason that journalists should also be held accountable for their actions and punished if they commit some gross impropriety.

He scoffs at the idea of self-regulation in media. “If we could regulate ourselves, why would we need any laws at all,” he asks, smiling a small, sarcastic smile. “I am all for freedom of the press,” he says. “And there have been innumerable instances when I have stood up for it. But no freedom can be absolute. Freedom must be subjected to reasonable restrictions in the public interest.”

The Press Council has passed the resolution to amend the Press Council Act to grant itself punitive powers and to bring the electronic media under its ambit as many as six times. But though he has gone to the Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, and the leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, Sushma Swaraj, with his plea, “nothing has been done about it as yet,” he says.

I change track and ask him why he makes a habit of issuing controversial statements — among his many memorable quotes are his assertion that 90 per cent of Indians were idiots and more recently, that Pakistan was a “fake” country created by the British. Of course, he has also spoken for many just causes — lashing out at Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee for arresting the professor who had circulated a cartoon, or lambasting the police for arresting two young girls for their Facebook post after Bal Thackeray’s death last year.

So what is he, a loose cannon, or a publicity junkie, as his critics would have it?

“I have never sought publicity,” Katju retorts. “I think publicity is a form of vulgarity. The point is that the time has come when you should speak out the truth.”

What about political correctness?

“I am not in politics. I am not seeking votes. So there’s no question of being politically correct,” he replies. “The question is whether these statements are correct and whether these are required by the nation or not.”

If he has declared that 90 per cent of Indians are fools, it’s because most Indians vote on the basis of caste and creed, he says. “They don’t see the merit of the candidate, they don’t see if he’s educated or uneducated. That’s why you have so many criminal elements in Parliament. Now democracy was not meant to be run like this. Democracy is a feature of an industrialised society, not a feudal society. You see, in many ways India is still a very backward country. The solution lies in promoting a scientific outlook and cultivating a modern, rational mindset. And I shall do what I can to that end.”

Katju comes from a family of judges. His father, uncle and grandfather were all justices. His grandfather Kailash Nath Katju went on to become Union law minister and Governor of Bengal and Odisha. I have been forbidden to ask him any “personal” questions, but he unbends somewhat and tells me that he was always keen to do social service. So after getting his law degree from Allahabad University in 1967, he went off to teach science and maths in a village school for two years. “There was no electricity there then, no pukka roads.”

Though Katju can dwell at length — and dwell incisively — on India’s socio-economic malaise, or the way the middle class is being squeezed from all sides and the instability that’s leading to, he looks happiest when I ask him about his reading. “I have always been a voracious reader,” he says, smiling a little. “That’s my only hobby.”

He talks about the great Russian and French writers — Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Hugo, Flaubert — and Dickens, Mark Twain and John Steinbeck. He is partial to writers who depicted the social condition of their time such as Munshi Premchand, Saratchandra Chattopadhyay or Tamil poet Subramanya Bharathi, and he claims to have little patience with the current crop of writers who seem to write “only to sell”.

And he loves Urdu poetry, which he discovered after he taught himself the language. “Urdu was always a language of educated people in north India. It was only after 1947 that there was this propaganda that Urdu was the language of Muslims,” he exclaims.

He has read the works of poets around the world, but he feels that Urdu poetry, particularly the works of Ghalib, Faiz, Firaq and others, is matchless because it expresses the language of the heart like no other. “Dil ki awaaz nikalti hai…” he says, his face softening.

Clearly, there’s a part of Katju that’s swayed by matters of the heart. And when all is said and done, his heart too seems to be in the right place.