Kapil Sibal called him “a pioneer, a torchbearer and a ground-breaking innovator”, someone who had all the “attributes of one of the greatest judges of this country”. Justice Sanjiv Khanna, who took over as the new Chief Justice of the Supreme Court on Monday, praised him, saying, “He has left my task easy, as he has made so many advancements in technology and data.” But once the tributes die down and the eulogies fade, how will history remember and judge Justice Dhananjaya Yeshwant Chandrachud and his legacy? It’s a question fraught with complexity and nuance, much like the many thought-provoking and progressive judgments that the former Chief Justice of India delivered before demitting office last week.
Justice Chandrachud was a judge in the Supreme Court for roughly seven years, of which the last two saw him in the Chief Justice’s chair. It was a period fraught with political and social upheavals: a COVID pandemic that crippled the country’s economy, divisive elections across states and the country that were characterised by abrasive campaigns, and a growing trend of State power intruding into the private lives of citizens. Through these challenging times, CJI Chandrachud steered the country’s highest court on a path of progressiveness and balance, his Ayodhya Ram Temple judgment notwithstanding.
For example, just before taking over as the CJI, Justice Chandrachud gave a long interview to a national daily, which was a marked departure from the distance that earlier Chief Justices had kept from the press. Indeed, his tenure in the CJI’s chair was marked with an openness unseen in the history of the top court. This openness had its flip side too; in his farewell speech, Justice Chandrachud called himself “one of the most trolled judges” and wondered aloud if these hecklers would now “be rendered unemployed”, his tongue firmly in cheek. Most trolled or not, he was definitely one Chief Justice with a fine sense of humour!
Two crucial judgments that Justice Chandrachud was part of will forever mark his legacy and also show how difficult it will be to conveniently slot his tenure vis-a-vis the political realities of India. The first of them is the Ayodhya Ram Janmabhoomi case, in which the judgment was passed by a Bench headed by him back in November 2019. The court directed that the Ram temple would come up at the bitterly contested site where the Babri Masjid formerly stood and directed the government to find an alternate plot for the mosque to be built. Justice Chandrachud revealed in a recent interview that he had sat before the deity and “told him he needs to find a solution”, a pronouncement that was met with shock and jeers for what it said about the crossroads at which he stood during the judgment, his faith and his judicial acuity standing uncomfortably close to each other.
While this judgment turned out to be among the most controversial ones of his tenure, and made him look like someone aligned closely with the ruling establishment, there was also another crucial judgment that swung the other way, so to speak. In February this year, a five-judge bench headed by CJI Chandrachud struck down the electoral bonds scheme as “unconstitutional”, six years after Arun Jaitley, as the then finance minister, had introduced them. How the ruling BJP benefited from the bonds can be open to debate, but what can’t be contested is how the electoral bonds had become the focal point for a pitched battle between the Centre and the Opposition and the judgment dealt a moral blow to the former and strengthened the perception of the judiciary’s independence.
Among the other landmark judgments that Justice Chandrachud authored or was part of is the decriminalisation of Section 377 in 2018, where the judges made it clear that who a person chose as a partner was a fundamental right and equality was a cornerstone of life at the workplace or at home. Justice Chandrachud was also part of a five-judge Bench that decriminalised adultery in September 2018 by saying that the adultery law was a “codified rule of patriarchy” and interfered with a woman’s right to autonomy.
So, Justice Chandrachud may have sought divine help in a crucial judgment that has defined the fate and future of this country, but he was also a judge who repeatedly sided with progressive and liberal social order, delivering judgments that would push India ahead rather than backwards. That will probably be his lasting legacy, and let’s not forget that those judgments did not need divine intervention.