Playing the lead in his own courtroom drama
When Justice Chinnaswamy Swaminathan Karnan was sentenced by the Supreme Court on Tuesday, the now infamous Calcutta High Court judge came under the spotlight for all the wrong reasons. Karnan, whom a seven-judge bench headed by Chief Justice of India Jagdish Singh Khehar sentenced to six months in prison, has been at loggerheads with the apex court after making allegations of high level corruption in the judiciary through a letter sent to Prime Minister Narendra Modi in January.
The accusations, which were not the first of their kind made by the controversial judge, met the ire of the Supreme Court almost instantaneously, which launched contempt proceedings against Karnan for lowering the dignity of the Indian judiciary. Instead of defending his stance, as one would have expected the judge to do in such a situation, Karnan’s unprecedented choice of provoking the Supreme Court through his open defiance and retaliatory judicial orders have left both the judicial fraternity and outsiders shocked and surprised.
Terming the Supreme Court’s action as illegal and playing the caste card, Karnan refused to cooperate in the contempt case right from the beginning. His defiance, however, did not stop at failing to turn up for the hearings — he went on to initiate criminal actions against the seven judges under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act and even ordered the Central Bureau of Investigation to probe them. These events and his additional demand of the seven judges to answer the charges before him in Calcutta led to the Supreme Court to question his mental fitness and order a medical examination. Karnan, to ratchet up the fight, passed an order directing the examinations of all these seven judges instead.
Only days after, Karnan refused his medical test and instead took the highly provocative step of ‘sentencing’ the Supreme Court judges to five years imprisonment without concern for the superiority of the apex court or the procedure of the justice delivery system. This proved to be the last straw and broke the Supreme Court’s patience: in the first move of its kind, it ordered the sitting judge to serve six months in jail for contempt of court. The court also barred media houses from publishing any statements made by Karnan in the future and also restrained all courts and tribunals in the country from taking cognisance of any orders issued by the judge since the start of proceedings against him.
Karnan, 61, is not unfamiliar to contempt proceedings. In fact, he had himself initiated such an action in 2015 against the then Chief Justice of the Madras High Court, Sanjay K Kaul, after accusing him of corruption and personal harassment. Karnan said he was being given “insignificant and dummy” portfolios because he was a Dalit. The same year, he also accused another judge of sexually assaulting an intern in his chamber without providing any proof of the allegation. In another instance, he stormed into a courtroom and demanded to hear a case to which he was not assigned. In 2011, Karnan had also sparked a huge controversy by calling a press conference to accuse a fellow judge of “deliberately” touching him with his foot as he was a Dalit.
This series of events eventually led to the Supreme Court transferring Karnan from the Madras High Court to the Calcutta High Court in March 2016. This decision he stayed through a judicial order of his own, which was later upheld by a two-judge bench of the high court. The Supreme Court had threatened to initiate contempt proceedings against Karnan if he refused to follow the order. After a closed-door meeting with the then Chief Justice, T S Thakur, Karnan accepted the transfer and apologised for his actions saying that he had lost his “mental balance”.
Karnan hails from the Karnatham village in the Cuddalore district of Tamil Nadu where he was born in 1955. His father was a retired teacher and his mother a housewife, leading one to believe that his background was quite austere. After finishing high school and a pre-university course, he graduated with a science degree from New College, Chennai, and then pursued a course in law from Madras Law College which he completed in 1983. He then started his practice in civil side of the Madras High Court and served as a government counsel for the state and central governments till his elevation as a judge in 2009. His appointment had been made by the then Chief Justice of India, K G Balakrishnan, on the recommendation of the then Chief Justice of the Madras High Court, A K Ganguly. Later, Balakrishnan said he did not know Karnan personally and Ganguly said he did not remember how his name came up for consideration as a judge of the high court — a fact that has lent support to the criticisms of the present collegium based system of higher judicial appointments.
To add a further twist to this tale, Karnan is now known to have left Kolkata the morning of the Supreme Court’s decision to send him to jail. His whereabouts are unknown and the West Bengal police is currently looking for him in three states. This interesting turn of events should not come as much of a surprise though, considering the operatic melodrama that this saga has been since the beginning. Given the present situation, this Bollywood-style potboiler may still have some gas left in the chamber.