Justice Jagdish Singh Khehar, the senior-most judge of the Supreme Court, was sworn in as the 44th Chief Justice of India by President Pranab Mukherjee on Wednesday.
Justice Khehar will have a tenure for over seven months till August 28, 2017. He assumed office as a judge of the Supreme Court on September 13, 2011.
On his first day in office, Justice Khehar presided over courtroom 1 with Justices N.V. Ramana and D.Y. Chandrachud flanking him.
Justice Khehar is known for his firm and decisive approach to cases. His appointment comes at a time when the relationship between the government and the judiciary remains tense over an unprecedented number of judicial vacancies (400) in the HCs and eight in the SC.
Even on his last day at work, Justice T.S. Thakur, the current CJI’s predecessor, had accused the Centre of letting the Supreme Court Collegium’s recommendations of judicial appointments and transfers “languish on somebody’s desk.”
It will be on Chief Justice Khehar’s shoulders now to resolve the differences of opinions about the draft memorandum of procedure (MoP) for judicial appointments with the government.
It was a Constitution Bench led by Justice Khehar which had pushed into motion the exercise of re-drafting the over two-decade-old MoP in a bid to bring in transparency and accountability into the judicial appointments process. Justice Khehar, whose name is synonymous with the voluminous majority judgment he authored scrapping the government’s NJAC law to revive the Collegium, has now to contend with dissent inside the Supreme Court Collegium itself.
Justice Jasti Chelameswar, a member of the Collegium, does not attend its meetings. As the lone dissenting judge on the Constitution Bench which scrapped the NJAC law, Justice Chelameswar’s dissent was historic.
