PARADIGM SHIFT IN COLLEGIUM- ANOTHER BLACK DAY, ANOTHER SUPERSESSION

Abstract

Last year on 12th January 2018, the four senior-most judges after the then Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra - Justices Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, Madan Lokur and Kurian Joseph, in a first of its kind press conference had said that "unless the Supreme Court is preserved, democracy will not survive"1 . Justice Gogoi had said “It is a discharge of a debt to the nation that has brought us here. And we think that we have discharged our debt to the nation by telling you what is what.”2 Irony of ironies is that one year since the ‘historic’ press conference, Justice Gogoi (who now is the Chief Justice of India) led collegium on 10th January, 2019 took certain decisions which were appalling, arbitrary and raised lots of eyebrows across the bar and the bench. The collegium resolved to elevate Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Dinesh Maheshwari to the Supreme Court. The shattering fact and one that raises apprehensions not only on the Chief Justice and the whole collegium but also questions the integrity, opaqueness and arbitrary working style of the collegium system. The fact of the matter is that Justice Sanjiv Khanna stands at number 33 in the combined seniority of High Court Judges on an all-India basis, which therefore leads to supersession of 32 other judges. Another huge irony of the present matter is that Justice Sanjiv Khanna’s uncle is none other than the great Justice H.R. Khanna. Justice H.R.Khanna was the lone dissenting judge in the infamously famous habeas corpus case i.e. ADM Jabalpur v. Shivkant Shukla3 . As a result of his dissent and the act of upholding the democratic principles, he became the second judge in Indian judiciary to be superceded. And today his nephew is being elevated as a means of supersession which he fell victim of.