Of sound decisions and marked silences: CJI Sanjiv Khanna’s balancing act amidst turbulent times
Marked by dignity and deferral, Chief Justice Khanna’s term came amidst communally tense times and an institutional crisis of faith, and at the end raised the question: Was enough done?
Sushovan Patnaik
Published on: 13 May 2025, 01:46 pm
ON THE EVENING OF MARCH 15, Delhi High Court chief justice, D.K. Upadhyaya made the first communication to Sanjiv Khanna, the sitting chief justice of India, about a jarring development the previous midnight in a High Court judge’s bungalow on Tughlaq road. Till nearly 2 AM the previous night, fire personnel and Delhi police officials had scoured, taking videos and pictures of an outhouse in the residence of Yashwant Varma, after piles of burnt currency were discovered following an unexplained fire. A scandal such as this had not graced the Indian judiciary in at least a few years.
Khanna asked Upadhyaya to make some early inquiries through his registrar general, with Varma and the Commissioner of Police, and over the next few days, he would quietly observe the developments. On March 20, six days after the cash was first discovered, after Upadhyaya would send pictures and video footage of the cash, Khanna would sit down with the collegium and consider the idea of repatriating Varma back to Allahabad.
The next day, seven days after the fire broke out, Times of India carried a front page story: ‘Fire at HC judge’s house leads to recovery of cash pile’. As the news of the fire and the Court’s decision to surreptitiously transfer out Varma gathered momentum, the Supreme Court put out a press release stating that the decision to transfer was unconnected to the cash controversy. It was not a convincing stance. “I frankly, with the greatest of respect to the Supreme Court chief justice, do not believe what he’s saying here,” Arnab Goswami blasted on Republic TV, on a prime time slot, “because it lacks transparency.”
That same day, Khanna would receive the report from Upadhyaya who would indicate that “prima facie…the entire matter warrants a deeper probe.” He would ask Upadhyaya to pose certain questions to Varma regarding the issue and direct Varma not to dispose of his mobile phone.
There was a belief that the chief picked up pace only after the news was leaked out to the media a whole week after the incident. On March 22, in a near unprecedented move, Khanna made public Upadhyaya’s report as well as Varma’s response to the allegations along with the pictures and videos gathered by the fire personnel, besides forming a three-judge in-house inquiry panel.
“He managed to ensure that whatever process was followed was both fair and transparent and was such that would restore the confidence in the judiciary,” said senior advocate Huzefa Ahmadi, “It sent a message that the judiciary will deal with corruption very strongly when it is perceived within and would not brush it under the rug.”
But some believed, things may as well have gone differently had the media leak not happened. “These details did not come from the Supreme Court’s own volitions,” said Ashish Goel, an advocate practising in the Supreme Court.
G. Mohan Gopal, a former director of the National Judicial Academy and National Law School, Bengaluru, explained that while Khanna’s tenure marked a “quantum leap in transparency on the complaint”, the in-house process did not see any reform. “The framework needs improvement, but within that framework he has handled it well. The quantum leap in transparency helped to kill off needless speculation about how the incident came to light,” Gopal said.
But there would be another glaring miss: in a press release on May 5, the Court noted that the in-house inquiry committee had submitted its final report. On May 8, another press release noted that Khanna had sent a letter to the President and Prime Minister. Yet there was no indication that the report would be made public. “How can the end report not be in public domain?”asked senior advocate Sanjoy Ghose, explaining that without the report, there remained a cloud of mystery regarding the allegations, and was, in some ways, a “disservice to Justice Varma.”
In 2003, the Supreme Court, in a case concerning allegations against sitting Karnataka HC judges, had noted that reports on in-house committees are not liable to be made public. “What was happening in 2003 is also happening in 2025,” Goel said, noting that an opportunity to reform an opaque procedure in the backdrop of a historic moment for the judiciary was essentially squandered. “He is not leaving the Court more transparent than his predecessor,” Goel said.
Still, there was a feeling that Khanna could not be squarely held accountable since he seemed to be a chief who encouraged collective decisionmaking. “It was a collegial CJIship,” Ghose would tell me, indicating that major decisions seemed to be taken collectively by the Collegium. “If he had full liberty, I am sure he would have made the report, and action taken on the report public also,” Gopal speculated.
