Former Union law minister Shanti Bhushan passes away at 97
Former Union law minister and lawyer Shanti Bhushan on Tuesday passed away at the age of 97.
Former Union law minister and lawyer Shanti Bhushan on Tuesday passed away at the age of 97. Bhushan served as the law minister in the Morarji Desai-led Janata Party government from 1977 to 1979, which came to power after Emergency.
Bhushan was among the founding members of the Aam Aadmi Party which was formed in 2012. He had also actively participated in the agitation led by social activist Anna Hazare.
However, he fell out with AAP convenor Arvind Kejriwal within two years of the formation of the party. In 2014, Bhushan attacked Kejriwal questioning his organisational skills. His son Prashant Bhushan, also a lawyer, was a member of AAP's national executive and was expelled from AAP.
In 2018, he had moved the Supreme Court challenging the roster practice of allocation of cases in the top court by the chief justice of India. In his plea, Bhushan had contended that “the master of the roster cannot be an unguided and unbridled discretionary power that arbitrarily allocates cases to select judges.”
The top court later ruled that the CJI is the ‘master of the roster’ and has the authority to allocate cases to different benches of the apex court.
