Top court needs to be protected, assessed: Justice Chelameswar
I would prefer a judge with some political ideology to a judge who keeps changing his ideology with time
JUSTICE JASTI CHELAMESWAR
NEW DELHI: 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”. 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 govern- ment’s move to replace the collegium system of selected judges to the higher judiciary with a National Judicial Appointments Commission or NJAC (compris- ing 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”.