Ranjan Gogoi has got just eight working days left in the Supreme Court as the 46th Chief Justice of India (CJI) and not less than six path-breaking judgments to deliver. Like the Ayodhya imbroglio, the hearing of which concluded after 40 days, the Rafale deal and the Sabarimala temple issue where menstruating women were allowed inside the temple—despite religious proscription. Whether he will succeed in delivering these judgments before demitting office, remains to be seen.
To be honest, after fawning lawyers deliver their flowery speeches on the lawns of the Supreme Court on November 17, Justice Gogoi will demit office with a rather unsavoury reputation for presiding over a three-judge bench when he was an accused in a sexual harassment case and defaming a woman in her absence.
After that, she was refused a lawyer which is her fundamental right, and a clean chit given to Justice Gogoi by three judges including the present CJI-designate Sharad Bobde and two women judges, Indira Banerjee and Indu Malhotra. The nation will remember this unsavoury episode because it is not enough to make grandiloquent utterances in court but ensure that even a woman staffer of the Supreme Court gets justice—which appears to have been denied to her.
Be that as it may, Justice Gogoi cancelled his multi-nation foreign jaunt on October 17 to ensure he writes the judgments in the Ayodhya case, where 2.77 acres of land were partitioned by the Allahabad High Court between three disputants. He also has to write his judgment in the Sabarimala review case and decide whether the former Congress chief, Rahul Gandhi, committed contempt of court or not even after an unconditional apology for attributing the slogan “chowkidar chor hai” to the apex court.
The Supreme Court’s clean chit given to the Narendra Modi government in the 36 fighter jets bought from France is also under review and the CJI has yet to write his judgment. So, Gogoi’s parting gifts to India will be his judgments which will reveal how bold he is after his utterances during the press conference on January 12, 2018 with Justices Chelameswar, Madan Lokur and Kurien Joseph. It was Justice Gogoi who admitted the PIL demanding a probe into the death of Judge Loya was “selectively assigned” (by former CJI Deepak Misra) to a bench of his choice.
The 47th CJI-designate Sharad Arvind Bobde who will be sworn in on November 17th, feels the 2018 press conference was a “disturbing event” for the judiciary. He was conspicuous by his absence there which meant he did not support the so-called “rebel” judges although he visited Justice Chelameswar at his official bungalow the next day to defuse an explosive situation.
While he claims to believe in transparency, the 47th CJI-designate Sharad Bobde’s actions convey the exact opposite. The collegium’s remarks as to why a lawyer is unfit for judgeship is immune from defamation. But Justice Bobde has declared the right to reputation of a few unsavoury judges or lawyers overrides the right to know of the Indian people to know why they were bypassed.
So, the reasons for not elevating a lawyer as a judge or a judge as a chief justice will be kept hidden. Unknown to the people, from October 22, the Supreme Court collegium has stopped uploading its resolutions on its website which may signify a return to the dark ages of total secrecy in judicial appointments when the name of an incumbent judge was proposed by an interested judge and never opposed by other collegium members. Justice Chelameswar boycotted collegium meetings because no records were kept of these secretive proceedings where sometimes a few judges of doubtful integrity were elevated to the Supreme Court. But all that has now been conveniently forgotten with a change of CJIs.
The 47th CJI-designate Justice Sharad Bobde is the son of former advocate-general Arvind Bobde of the Bombay High Court who was appointed by the Congress government. Stiff and unbending, Bobde sat in room 36 on the first floor of the Bombay High Court where appellate lawyers kept a respectful distance from him.
Arvind Bobde appeared for the state in the notorious MD marks scandal where the late chief minister Nilangekar Patil had to resign because he allegedly phoned the examiner to request him to pass his daughter at the MD examination conducted by the University of Bombay (at it was then known). Justice Madhav Laxman Pendse of the Bombay High Court who unseated the chief minister also expired a few years ago in Pune.
A product of Nagpur, Justice Bobde was sworn in as a judge of the Bombay High Court on March 29, 2000. Nagpur has contributed chief ministers to Maharashtra (like Devendra Fadnavis) and judges galore to the portals of the Bombay high court. Justice Vasanti Naik who retired in May 2018 is the daughter of former advocate-general, V R Manohar, who like Arvind Bobde, built a brand name for his family in Nagpur and in the Bombay High Court. He was the editor of All India Reporter published from Nagpur. Like other high courts, certain families have produced lawyers or judges for generations so that names like the Bobdes, Tulzapurkars, Manohars, Chandrachuds, Dharmadikaris, are well-known.
The point here is that during his tenure of 17 months as CJI, the 47th CJI-designate Sharad Bobde will definitely not lean in favour of transparency which contradicts the idiom that in a democracy it is the people who are sovereign while the judiciary is not answerable to anybody but itself. By not divulging why certain judges have not been elevated to the Supreme Court, Justice Bobde will reverse all that Justice Chelameswar fought for during his tenure in the Supreme Court.
And that is disastrous for democracy where the people have a right to know their judges.
The writer holds a Ph.D in Media law and is a journalist-cum-lawyer of the Bombay high court.
