Justice Varale – a public-spirited judge with an Ambedkar connection

While recommending his elevation, the collegium pointed out that he is the only chief justice of a high court to be from a Scheduled Caste. “I was fortunate to be born in a family that was blessed by Dr B R Ambedkar. I am in this noble institution all because of the great scholar and political thinker,” Justice Varale had said at a farewell event organised for him by the Bombay Bar Association on October 12, 2022.

He said his grandfather was taken to Aurangabad (now known as Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar) by Ambedkar and appointed as superintendent of the college that Ambedkar had started there – Milind Mahavidyalaya.

“Otherwise a small person from a remote area (referring to his grandfather) could not have even dreamt of going to Aurangabad, and then his future generations taking up the legal profession and adorning the seat of a judge of the High Court,” Justice Varale said at the event. He has also said that Ambedkar had advised his father, Bhalchandra Varale, to pursue legal education. Bhalchandra Varale went on to become a judicial officer in several courts and ultimately Registrar of the Bombay High Court.

Born in 1962 at Karnataka’s Nipani, on the border with Maharashtra, Justice Varale studied Arts and Law from Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar Maratha University, before getting enrolled as an advocate in 1985.

At the beginning of his career, he joined the chamber of advocate S N Loya, and practised civil and criminal law. He was also a lecturer at Ambedkar Law College in Aurangabad from 1990 to 1992. He went on to work as an assistant government pleader and additional public prosecutor at the Bombay High Court bench in Aurangabad, and as additional standing counsel for the Union of India. He was appointed as a Bombay High Court judge on July 18, 2008.

As Bombay HC judge, benches headed by him initiated suo motu cases in public interest, including a PIL on a stalled project to publish the writings and speeches of Ambedkar.

A bench headed by Justice Varale also initiated a suo motu PIL in January 2022, taking cognisance of a news report about the risky boat ride that girls from Khirkhindi village in Maharashtra’s Satara district have to undertake daily to reach their school. The bench asked the government to provide help to school children facing a similar plight in the state.

After becoming Karnataka HC Chief Justice on October 15, 2022, he continued taking up public interest cases. When a Bengaluru metro pillar collapsed in January 2023, killing a young mother and her daughter, Justice Varale demanded answers from the city’s civic authorities by initiating a suo motu PIL based on reportage of the incident in the media.

In December 2023, he initiated a suo motu PIL after a tribal woman was stripped and beaten up in Belagavi because her son eloped with a woman from a wealthier family.

Strongly condemning the incident, Justice Varale said, “How does this happen? On the one hand we are celebrating Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav, and after 75 years this is the situation? We can only borrow the words of Shakespeare in Hamlet and say: ‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark’.”

He also had strong words for the Karnataka government for tardy implementation of laws meant to protect Scheduled Castes and Tribes from being subjected to discrimination.

In February 2023, a bench headed by Chief Justice Varale, pulled up the state government over failures in the implementation of the SC/ST Act. “The state government cannot be only a mute spectator in such matters. When the Act provides for at least two statutory meetings to be conducted in the calendar year, not conducting even a single meeting for one year, is certainly not in compliance with the assurance given to this court…,” the bench ruled. Subsequently, the state government held a meeting of the high-powered vigilance committee set up to oversee the implementation of the Act.