Chandrachud’s tenure controversial, disappointing, forgettable: Dave

NT Correspondent

Bengaluru

Senior lawyer Dushyant Dave has said that he is deeply disappointed by D.Y. Chandrachud's tenure as Chief Justice of India. Several weeks before Justice Chandrachud took over as the CJI in November 2022, Dave recalled, he had written a congratulatory letter to the CJI designate but had also voiced his apprehension that in politically sensitive cases, the new CJI could disappoint the nation. In a wide-ranging interview with Karan Thapar for The Wire, Dave answered questions on the judgements delivered by CJI Chandrachud, his performance as the master of the roster, his administrative orders, his conduct outside the court and his insatiable urge for media attention, his failures as a judge and his failure to administer justice and reform the judicial system as CJI. "I hope history does not remember Chandrachud and I hope his legacy is entirely forgotten as quickly as possible,” senior lawyer said. Dave said, "He’s (Chandrachud) like Indian cricketers, who are very successful in media. But when it comes to the Test matches against New Zealand, they fail miserably. So, Chandrachud was the media's favourite.'' Among other things, Dave himself a former president of the Supreme Court Bar Association singled out the following fault lines in the CJI’s tenure, among the longest in recent times:

• Dave questioned several of the judgements delivered by Chandrachud, including the ones on the constitutionality of abrogating Article 370, the refusal to set up an SIT to inquire into the quid pro quo of electoral bonds, the Ayodhya verdict and the tweaking of a decision by a three-judge bench to enable Jay Shah to become the BCCI secretary.
• By inviting the prime minister to his residence to perform an aarti together and by saying that he had derived divine inspiration for authoring the Ayodhya judgement, which he refused to sign (along with fellow judges), Dave feels, CJI Chandrachud exposed himself. His judicial approach has been ‘inexplicable’, said Dave.
• He ducked a large number of politically sensitive cases and sat over the legal challenges to the Citizenship Amendment Act, on contentious cases related to 'love jihad', hijab bans, etc.
• The CJI cannot escape his responsibility for not ensuring the bail hearing for political dissenters such as Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam, not to speak of the accused in the far-fetched Bhima Koregaon case, for years and ensuring that they remain incarcerated without trial.
• As a judge, he refused to order an inquiry into the death of special judge Loya under mysterious circumstances while hearing a politically sensitive case.
• As the master of the roster, Chandrachud acted arbitrarily and subjectively, allotting sensitive cases to specific benches that appeared to pander to the party in power. Indeed, in an unprecedented action, he withdrew a case being heard by a bench headed by Justice Sanjay Krishna Kaul, which was pulling up the government for not implementing the recommendations of the collegium thus letting the government off the hook.
• As CJI, Chandrachud seems to have been eerily ineffectual where he could have been most effective.
• He also was part of the bench that ordered an inquiry by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) into the Hadia case, where an adult Hindu woman had married a Muslim man. The woman finally appeared before the apex court to say that she had married on her own free will.
• As the CJI, his tenure saw the number of pending cases in the Supreme Court go up from ~69,000 in 2022 to ~82,000 in 2024. In the high courts, the pending cases went up during the same period from 45 million to 51 million. He has failed, then, to deliver justice quickly, and a large number of cases have remained pending for more than 30 years now.
• Chandrachud did, however, deliver several populist judgements, for which he was applauded such as the judgement overturning the colonial criminalisation of homosexuality. However, Dave says, the CJO was sailing with the wind there and knew that those judgements would get him more attention and applause around the world.