The judiciary is where citizens turn to for justice and the Supreme Court is the last court of appeal. But on Friday, in an unprecedented move and in what can be termed as a judicial tsunami four Supreme Court judges came out in the open to protest against the administrative actions of the present Chief Justice of India, Dipak Mishra. They held a press conference and spoke openly about their apprehensions on the imminent collapse of the judicial system following the arbitrary manner in which ‘cases with far reaching consequences’ were assigned to selective benches. All four judges – Justices Chelameshwar, Ranjan Gogoi, Madan Lokur and Kurien Joseph are known to be ‘sober and responsible’ and have done what they did because there was no other way to stem the rot in the system. The four judges now termed as ‘rebel judges’ observed that things are not in order in the highest judiciary and in the administration of the Supreme Court such as allocation of cases to suppliant judges without due consultation or consensus with fellow judges merely because the CJI is the master of the roster.
Justice Chelameshwar in the press conference said he and his colleagues had compelling reasons to come out into the open because he did not want people of this country to say that the four judges had sold their souls by not speaking out against the injustices they presided over. The four judges had tried to meet the CJI to prevail upon him to take corrective action and not assign cases arbitrarily but in vain.
The rebellion also sprung from the fact that the bench constituted to investigate Judge BH Loya’s death was not above suspicion. Loya who died under mysterious circumstance in December 2014 was presiding as CBI judge over the Sohrabuddin murder case in Gujarat when Amit Shah was Home Minister. Sohrabuddin was an extortionist who with his wife Kauser Bi was killed in a fake encounter. The case of Loya’s death and the circumstances thereafter concerned citizens to ask for an independent investigation supervised by the apex court. Also in question is the case of Kalikho Pul, the former chief minister of Arunachal Pradesh who died of suicide allegedly because of demands made on him by certain judges who he had named in a suicide note, for giving a favourable judgement in his case. Some of the judges are now in the Supreme Court bench. The case was treated as a petition thereby raising more suspicions. All these must have weighed heavily on the minds of the four judges who had no way out but to revolt against what can be called a degenerate system.