ON Monday, the Union government notified the appointment of Krishnan Vinod Chandran, the Chief Justice of Patna High Court, as a judge of the Supreme Court. He is likely to take the oath of office on Thursday, to be administered by Chief Justice of India (CJI) Sanjiv Khanna.
With the appointment of Justice Chandran, the Supreme Court will be functioning with 33 judges against the sanctioned posts of 34 judges, including the CJI. The Supreme Court judge Hrishikesh Roy is slated to retire on January 31.
On January 7, the collegium comprising CJI Khanna and Justices B.R. Gavai, Surya Kant, Hrishikesh Roy and Abhay S. Oka had recommended the name of Justice Chandran as judge of the Supreme Court.
In their recommendation, the collegium had noted that there was no representation on the Bench of the Supreme Court from the High Court of Kerala. Until recently, Justice C.T. Ravikumar represented the High Court of Kerala in the Supreme Court. Justice Ravikumar retired on January 5.
At present, the Supreme Court Bench has no representation from the high courts of Jharkhand, Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh, Meghalaya, Orissa, Sikkim and Tripura.
Justice Chandran was appointed as a judge of the High Court of Kerala on November 8, 2011, and was elevated as the Chief Justice of the High Court of Judicature at Patna on March 29, 2023, and has been functioning as the Chief Justice of that high court since then.
On Tuesday, the government also notified the transfer of Chief Justice of the Bombay High Court Justice Devendra Kumar Upadhyaya as Chief Justice of the Delhi High Court and Chief Justice of Telangana High Court Alok Aradhe as Chief Justice of the Bombay High Court.
On January 7, the collegium had ordered this reshuffle for reasons not made available to the public.
The government's selective approach to the recommendations of the collegium has continued unabated. The government has continued to sit over the collegium's recommendation made on November 27 to transfer the Delhi High Court judge C.D. Singh to the Allahabad High Court.
The government has also withheld the transfers of as many as four judges of the Gujarat High Court. On August 3, 2023, a five-judge collegium of the Supreme Court decided to transfer Justices Alpesh Y. Kogje, Kumari Gita Gopi, Hemant M. Prachchhak and Samir J. Dave to the high courts of Allahabad, Madras, Patna and Rajasthan respectively.
However, the recommendations have been gathering dust at the Union ministry of law and justice for over a year.
The same is the case with the proposed transfer of Allahabad High Court judge Justice Prakash Padia to the Jharkhand High Court. The collegium had recommended Justice Padia’s transfer on August 10 last year. The recommendation is yet to be effectuated.
On February 3, 2023, a Supreme Court Bench comprising Justices Sanjay Kishan Kaul and Abhay S. Oka, while calling the transfer of judges “a serious issue; more serious than anything else” warned the Union government of “unpalatable consequences” if the collegium’s recommendations to transfer high court judges were not given effect in the next ten days.
On November 20, 2023, when the Bench took up the contempt petition and flagged the inaction of the Union government over the transfer of the judges, the Attorney General of India requested the Bench to take up the matter after some time and assured the court that it would not be disappointed after looking at the efforts he promised to make to ensure the recommendations are acted upon.
The Bench acceded to the request of the Attorney General and directed to list the matter on December 5, 2023.
However, the contempt petition was never listed on December 5, as directed by the Bench. When Advocate Prashant Bhushan mentioned the matter before Justice Kaul, who was set to retire in a few weeks, informed Bhushan that he had not deleted the petition from his court nor was he unwilling to hear it.
When Bhushan exhorted that the Bench should seek an explanation about the “very strange” deletion of the matter from the registry, Justice Kaul told him, “I am sure the Chief Justice (of India) is aware of it.”
He added cryptically, “Some things are best left unsaid.” At that time, Justice Dr D.Y. Chandrachud was the CJI and thus the master of the roster.
The contempt petition, which the Justice Kaul-led Bench had been hearing, has been listed for hearing only once since November 2023, in October 2024, even though the recommendations on the transfer of judges as well the appointment of judges continue to remain pending with the government.
CJI Chandrachud did not list the contempt petition flagging delay in notifying the recommendations of the collegium during his two-year tenure, nor has Justice Khanna done so in the first two months of his tenure as the CJI.
