Arrears a concern, says Justice Chelameswar

NEW DELHI: The second senior-most judge in the Supreme Court hierarchy, Justice Jasti Chelameswar, on Monday expressed concern over the rising arrears of the top court and that it was imperative to find ways and means to clear these cases.

“The enormous jurisdiction conferred on the court in addition to its quest to do complete justice has led to huge arrears,” he said at a function to release an edited version of the Supreme Court of India, the Beginnings, George H. Gadbois.

“This is impossible to clear. Whether it will add to the glory of the institution must be an area of examination and concern. A solution must be found. It is imperative to find ways and means to do this,” he said.


He was reflecting on the state of the Indian judiciary.

Justice Chelameswar also seized the opportunity to contend that an independent, impartial judiciary was necessary for a liberal democracy like India to flourish.

He urged scholars and researchers to concentrate on where the court had failed and succeeded. Though one one-eighth of the country has a direct brush with the judiciary, millions are impacted by its myriad decisions, he said.

He lamented the fact that the top court had become a court of superintendence over lower courts though it was never envisaged to be one.

Justice Chelameswar along with the next three senior-most judges Ranjan Gogoi, in line to be CJI after Dipak Misra demits office, Justices Kurian Joseph and Madan B. Lokur, had recently created a sensation when they had stormed out of the court to protest arbitrariness in assigning politically sensitive cases such as that of the Justice B.H. Loya case.

They had also in the press conference flagged the absence of an in-house mechanism to deal with the memorandum of procedure dealing with appointment of judges to the superior courts and a mechanism to deal with allegations against the CJI himself, bypassing him, in the context of the recent medical scam case.