Justice Chelameswar takes on CJI

New Delhi: Justice J. Chelameswar the seniormost judge in the Supreme Court on Saturday openly took on the Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra for lack of transparency in the allocation of cases to different benches in the Supreme Court and alleged that there must be a new mechanism to deal with this issue.

Participating in the Karan Thapar’s interview at the Constitution Club, he said there should be no suspicion in allocation of cases as that would lead to people losing faith in the judicial process. He said there was no reason why the CJI ought to have set aside his order referring a writ petition on medical college admission scam to a top five judges of the apex court. He said there was nothing wrong in assigning to himself a writ petition as he felt that it was an important matter.

On a question from Mr. Thapar, whether CJI Misra should be impeached, he said impeachment was not the solution. Rather, there should be an internal mechanism within the judiciary, for dealing with cases of misconduct by judges of apex court and HCs, the judge said

He said “One of the magazines even wrote that I should be impeached. I don’t know why this nation is worried about impeachment and is obsessed about it. In fact we wrote in that judgment in Justice C.S Karnan contempt case last year)…that there should be a mechanism (internal) to put the system in order. Impeachment is not the answer for every question and every problem.”