Chief Justice of India TS Thakur won't take back demand to fill vacancies

NEW DELHI: Chief justice of India TS Thakur won’t back down on his demand that the government move quickly to fill judicial vacancies as cases pile up at overworked courts, high-level judicial sources said. “The CJI cannot back down and will not back down” as it would set a wrong precedent, one of them said, scotching any talk of a meeting with high-level representatives of the executive to resolve the row. “Certainly not,” echoed Supreme Court Bar Association president Dushyant Dave, dismissing suggestions from a few top court judges that constitutional functionaries sitting across the table could sort out the issue.

The sources cited above said the top court expects the government to follow its judgments and clear the names pending with it. The appointments have stalled as the Supreme Court and the government haven’t been able to agree on the memorandum of procedure (MoP) for the process. This follows the Supreme Court having struck down the move by the government to put in place the National Judicial Appointments Commission (NJAC) to pick judges, which would have given the executive a greater say in the matter. That ruling restored the collegium system run by judges that has been in place for more than two decades. “The government is bound by the suggestions made by the collegium,” said Dave.

“Otherwise, it will result in the collegium taking independent, objective decisions and the government stalling it on purely subjective criteria. This is not a healthy trend… The government is not justified in indirectly interfering with the process of appointing judges by an indirect method in the name of framing an MoP.”

If the government does not act, it is well within the chief justice’s powers to withdraw judicial work from judges whose transfers are yet to be formally cleared by the government, sources said. The chief justice had told the attorney general last week to get the government moving on the transfers or have judicial work withdrawn from the judges. Thakur was referring to the top court collegium’s recommendation to transfer justices MR Shah and Valmiki Mehta that was yet to be made effective by the government. A senior judge contested this, however, saying that the power to withdraw judicial work was only a procedural safeguard pending an enquiry against a judge.