I see where your concern is coming from. If the SC were to make a statement/ pass an order saying that the government should not allow the foodgrains to rot, it would not be the formulation of any policy as you correctly state. It would be a statement of the obvious, of pretty significant symbolic value. However it would be a pronouncement which the Supreme Court qua the Supreme Court is not legitimate to make. It is an ethical judgment and as much as the Supreme Court would like to be, it is not the moral and ethical conscience of the nation.
By telling the Supreme Court to lay off, you’re quite right in saying that Manmohan Singh made this issue a policy issue. And that is precisely what it is. And if we don’t like the policy of the government, or the complete lack of one, feel it is morally and ethically abhorrent, it is entirely open to us to vote the government out in the next elections. A significant legislative issue such as this should not become a judicial one. It’s bad for the judiciary and it’s bad for the cause itself, as many similar judicial interventions in such matters have shown.
I’m also reminded of a saying by perhaps the most eloquent American judge never to have made the Supreme Court, Learned Hand, who wrote,
“that a society so riven that the spirit of moderation is gone, no court can save; that a society where that spirit flourishes, no court need save; that in a society which evades its responsibility by thrusting upon the courts the nurture of that spirit, that spirit in the end will perish”

We’re certainly a riven society, most definitely in this matter. Let’s not leave it for the courts to sort this one out for us.

Maybe the SC isn’t competent to make such pronouncements either; I just feel that when Dr. Singh told the court to lay off “policy” issues he sort of resigned an important moral question into the policy domain. Does an apparently “socialist” state (whatever that means) have the right to preside over the destruction of a publicly owned resource as basic as food? And is that a question to be answered by policy makers? Sure, the distribution of food grains (by any method) has implications for policy but so does the existence of rotting food grains in the first place.

I’ve articulated myself very poorly and I apologise. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that Dr. Singh should really have come up with a better response than – it’s none of your business.