Justice Chelameswar retires, says no regrets about press conference on CJI

In an interview after retiring, Supreme Court judge Justice Chelameswar seemed to suggest that nothing had changed in the judicial system after he, and three other judges, aired their grievances over the Chief Justice of India in a press conference.

Jasti Chelameswar, who retired as a Supreme Court judge on Friday, has no regrets about holding a press conference – unprecedented for a judge of the top court – along with three of his fellow judges on January 12, airing grievances over the way Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra was allocating cases and administering the court. The judges had tried to “set things right”, he said in an interview, and when nothing worked, decided “to inform the nation”.

Retired Supreme Court judge Justice Jasti Chelameswar says every office in the land, including the Chief Justice’s, has to be “subject to public scrutiny”. (PTI File Photo)

Chelameswar seemed to suggest that nothing had changed, but admitted that the press conference “created awareness” about the goings-on in the court and how the Supreme Court too needs to be “protected” and its activities be “assessed periodically”.

Chelameswar was the only judge to support the government’s move to replace the collegium system of selected judges to the higher judiciary with a National Judicial Appointments Commission or NJAC (comprising the chief justice, two other judges of the Supreme Court, the law minister, and two eminent individuals). In 2015, the top court struck down the NJAC Act as unconstitutional.

In his interview, he agreed that the current process of appointing judges isn’t “fair, rational and transparent”. Chelameswar’s view on the collegiums is well known. In September, 2016, he wrote to the then Chief Justice of India, TS Thakur, expressing his “dissent at the non-transparent manner” in which it was working, but as he says, “nothing much has changed since then”.

Every office in the land, including the Chief Justice’s, has to be “subject to public scrutiny”, he said. In a democracy, he added, “no public office holder is beyond scrutiny.” And the chief justice, he added, has to work consultatively. Even the Prime Minister works consultatively with the cabinet, Chelameswar said.

The buzz in Delhi’s power circles is that the chief justice may pick anyone other than Ranjan Gogoi, the second senior-most judge in the court currently, as his successor because the latter was one of the four judges who held the press conference on January 12. Commenting on the practice of the Chief Justice recommending who his successor should be, Chelameswar said there is “nothing wrong in it”. But if the Chief Justice is not recommending the “name of the next senior-most judge”, he should “have the freedom to do so, provided he records the reasons” for not doing so, Chelameswar added.

Chelameswar has decided not to take up “any post-retirement job” and plans to spend time in his ancestral village in Krishna district of Andhra Pradesh, and Hyderabad.