Justice Sanjiv Khanna, who is set to take over as the next Chief Justice of India, and CJI D.Y. Chandrachud who he will succeed, have an interesting common link to the well known ADM Jabalpur case of the 1970’s.
CJI Chandrachud’s father, former CJI Y.V. Chandrachud, was on a five-judge Constitution bench that passed the ADM Jabalpur verdict in 1976. The court had in the backdrop of the Emergency upheld by a 4:1 majority a presidential order that barred anyone detained or arrested from seeking relief through a habeas corpus or any other writ filed in the high court.
The lone dissenting voice on the bench then was Justice Hans Raj Khanna, who was Justice Sanjiv Khanna’s uncle.
In his dissenting judgment, Khanna wrote: “What is at stake is the rule of law... the question is whether the law speaking through the authority of the Court shall be absolutely silenced and rendered mute.”
The dissent registered by Justice Khanna has been viewed as a brave act and also an act of sacrifice. It is believed to have cost him the top post in the Supreme Court. He was superseded and Justice M.H. Beg, who was junior to him in the court, was appointed as the CJI by the Indira Gandhi government in 1977.
In 2017, when the Supreme Court passed the landmark privacy judgment, the present CJI had then authored a separate yet concurring order in which he overruled the ADM Jabalpur verdict.
Overruling the ADM Jabalpur verdict, Chandrachud wrote, “The judgments rendered by all the four judges constituting the majority in ADM Jabalpur are seriously flawed. Life and personal liberty are inalienable to human existence.”
In the judgment, Chandrachud penned a sort of a tribute to Justice H.R. Khanna. He wrote: “The view taken by Justice Khanna must be accepted, and accepted in reverence for the strength of its thoughts and the courage of its convictions.”
Justice Sanjiv Khanna’s elevation to the post of CJI, in this historical backdrop, does seem like poetic justice.