Justice Markandey Katju on Sunday took to Twitter to criticise historian Ramachandra Guha.
Calling him a "superficial and highly overpraised person", Katju wondered why the historian was given importance.
"@Ram_Guha is a superficial&highly overpraised person, posing, like many others, to be an 'intellectual'. I dont know y u guys give him so much importance ? (sic)" he wrote on Twitter.
Guha and his work became a talking point on social media on Sunday after it was revealed that Hindustan Times had refused to publish an article that was slated to be part of the historian's ongoing column for the publication.
"For print and online readers of my regular "Past and Present" column in the Hindustan Times—for this Sunday's issue I had written on the folly and vanity of the Central Vista project. The newspaper has censored the column. The piece will soon appear in another (and braver) forum," Guha took to Twitter to announce on Sunday morning.
Guha claimed that while the editors he had worked with at HT were happy to publish his article, they were "overruled by their bosses and by the management"
"I was given the option of junking this piece and continuing the column. I have chosen to stop writing for them altogether," he added in another tweet.
The article was later published in The Wire with the headline What HT Wouldn't Publish: The Folly and Vanity of the Project to Redesign Delhi". It begins with a note outlining the reason for the change in venue of the article.
Founding editor of The Wire, Siddharth Varadarajan later took to Twitter to share the article, calling it an "important, reasoned piece".
"The fact that Delhi's top-selling (and India's 3rd-largest) English newspaper chose to spike this—and lose a fine columnist—tells us @narendramodi 's makeover of the big media is complete," he added.
