Former Supreme Court Judge, Justice Jasti Chelameswar, recently said that all respectable Indian institutions are under threat. He retired as the second most senior judge of the highest court in the country in June. Talking about the recent CBI and RBI scandals, he said that these institutions losing their autonomy should have been seen as a sign when he and three other judges had held a press conference against the lack of transparency in the Supreme Court in January this year.  
 
On one hand, the director and special director of Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) were sent on leave over graft allegations and on the other hand, the official of Reserve Bank of India and the Finance Ministry were caught in a verbal spat over the functioning of the agency and its limits.
 
In an exclusive interview with Bloomberg Quint, Justice Chelameswar said, “If the highest court of this country, a constitutional organ, is disturbed in its functioning, then why talk about other organisations that aren’t constitutional organisations?”
 
Talking about CBI and RBI he said, “Their status is slightly lesser than constitutional. CBI isn’t even a statutory organisation. It’s a mythical beast. God alone knows what are its legal structures. In fact, there’s a judgment of the Gauhati High Court saying it has no statutory backing. The appeal is pending. The matter is still not decided by the court. I think these are matters which should be decided on priority basis. Nobody wants these things to be decided. These things, undecided, give a lot of scope for speculation. The result is all this.”
 
He raised pertinent questions about why was he and other judges being asked to resolve their matter internally and what came out of accusing him of having a personal agenda. “What’s happening in the CBI? What’s happening in the Reserve Bank (of India)? Apart from their legal status, are they not important institutions in the governance of this country? When we held the press conference there were people, great people, learned intellectuals, who believed that I had a personal agenda. So why is it happening in CBI? Why is it happening in the RBI?” he said in the interview.
 
Citizens of Justice and Peace had accessed the letter given to the then Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra and reported that, “Four Judges of Supreme Court, J Chelameswar, J Ranjan Gogoi, J Madan B. Lokur and J Kurian Joseph wrote a letter to the Chief Justice of India addressing their concern about the way allocation of few cases has been done by the Hon’ble Justice of India. In the letter, they have said the convention of recognizing the privilege of the CJI to form the roster and assign the cases is only devised for a disciplined and efficient working of the court and is not based on any superior authority, legal or factual of the Chief Justice over his colleagues. Also, it is too well settled in the jurisprudence of this country that the Chief Justice is only the first among the equals- nothing more and nothing less.”
 
They accused the Chief Justice India of assigning cases that have far-reaching consequences for the nation and the institution to benches ‘of their preference’ without any rational basis for such assignment. They warned the CJI, “this must be guarded against at all costs.” “We are not mentioning the details only to avoid embarrassing the institution but note that such departures have already damaged the image of the institution to some extent”, the concerned judges wrote.
 
In the span of eight months following this unprecedented press conference, the CJI was declared the ‘Master of Roster’ three times by the SC.
 
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Image: Hindustan Times

Supreme Court Justice Jasti Chelameswar, 64, whose last working day was Friday, May 18, was the second of the five senior-most judges on the court. Chelameswar was born in Andhra Pradesh, the son of a district court lawyer. He obtained a bachelor’s degree in physics from Chennai’s Loyola College before pursuing a degree in law. Prior to being appointed to the Supreme Court in 2011, Chelameswar also served as Chief Justice of the Kerala and Guwahati High Courts, and also on the Andhra Pradesh High Court. 

In 2015, Justice Chelameswar was the lone dissenting judge in the National Judicial Appointments Commission (NJAC) case, ruling in favour of the NJAC. He criticised the lack of transparency in the selection process for judges, saying, “Proceedings of the collegium were absolutely opaque and inaccessible both to public and history, barring occasional leaks”. Chelameswar said, “Such a state of affairs does not either enhance the credibility of the institution or good for the people of this country.” 

Also in 2015, the two-judge bench of Justice Chelameswar and Justice Rohinton Nariman, in the case of Shreya Singhal vs. Union of India, struck down Section 66A of the Information Technology Act, which had previously been used to target those vocalising dissent, among others. The bench deemed Section 66A was in violation of the Article 19 of the Constitution that guarantees the right to freedom of expression. It stated that “…the possibility of Section 66A being applied for purposes not sanctioned by the Constitution cannot be ruled out. It must, therefore, be held to be wholly unconstitutional and void.”

In August 2017, Justice Chelameswar was part of the nine-judge bench that unanimously ruled that privacy is a fundamental right. Chelameswar was one of the justices that issued independent, concurring judgments, in which he wrote, “Fundamental rights are the only constitutional firewall to prevent State’s interference with those core freedoms constituting liberty of a human being. The right to privacy is certainly one of those core freedoms which is to be defended. It is part of liberty within the meaning of that expression in Article 21.”

Addressing the media at the unprecedented press conference held by four sitting justices of the Supreme Court in January 2018, Chelameswar said, “Many things which are less than desirable have happened in the last few months…We do not want people to say 20 years later that all four senior-most judges sold their souls”. In a letter to Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra, the four justices alleged there had been instances in which “cases having far-reaching consequences for the nation and the institution had been assigned by the Chief Justice of this Court selectively to the Benches ‘of their preferences’ without any rational basis for such assignment.” This was not the first time Chelameswar went toe-to-toe with CJI Misra.

On his last working day, Justice Chelameswar followed tradition, sharing a bench with Chief Justice Misra. Advocate Prashant Bhushan said Chelameswar “did a great job in upholding democracy,” a sentiment also expressed by senior advocate Rajiv Dutta. Chelameswar, who had declined an invite from the Supreme Court Bar Association for a farewell function saying he wanted to keep his retirement a “private affair,” simply rose for the day, folded his hands and said, “It’s my only response”.

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