Known for his candour and wit, Bombay HC judge Gautam Patel retires

He also said that the heritage HC building has a “special place” in his mind and its 150 year  legacy will be carried forward whenever a new HC complex is created in future. “There is no other building like this on the planet. Take a stone from this building and lay it as a foundation stone there. Keep the bridge alive,” he said before bowing down in gratitude to the gathering as a “final act”.

Appointed in June 2013, Justice Gautam Shirish Patel demitted office on Thursday. Apart from several landmark rulings, Justice Patel’s characteristic candour and dry wit marked his decade-long tenure. Despite being stern, Patel found humour in dull legal arguments, mundane requests for adjournments and the Bar in his courtroom number 24 would break into laughter, even when they were at the receiving end.

“FETOAFL: You will be included, whether you like it or not on my FETOAFL WhatsApp group. Don’t bother googling it. It’s Friday Evenings At the Office Are for Losers. You will bail at 5:30pm on a Friday evening. Get a life. At least once a week,” a note for interns in his office read.

There was an incident where on a request for an adjournment, after the plaintiff’s lawyer sought more time to make final arguments, Justice Patel, in an order about the next date of hearing, wrote, “As to when that day will dawn, I cannot say – for among the odds and ends on my desk, the one thing conspicuous by its absence is anything resembling a crystal ball.”

In his farewell speech at a function held by Advocates Association of Western India, Justice Patel urged eligible lawyers to “seriously” consider an offer of judgeship, and said that while the judges faced a lot of pressure, humour during court proceedings helped in taking the stress away.

His rulings expanded on free speech and cautioned against state power on fundamental rights. In January, Justice Patel in a split verdict, struck down the amended IT Rules providing a government Fact Check Unit (FCU) for social media platforms. The government “cannot coercively classify speech as true or false and compel the non-publication of the latter. That is nothing but censorship,” he wrote. In a 2019 case, denying an interim ruling in a defamation suit by construction giant Lodha Group against an RTI activist and journalist for comments against the quality of construction, Justice Patel wrote that “to say the emperor has no clothes is not defamation.”

“Calling out someone, with fair comment and justification, is not defamation. To put it differently: to say the emperor has no clothes is not defamation. It never has been,” he observed. In Sept-ember, 2015, dismissing a defam-ation plea by National Stock Exchange (NSE) against Money-life, founded by Debashis Basu and Sucheta Dalal, Justice Patel had noted that defamation law should “not to be used to gag, to silence, to suppress, to subjugate” the media and should be “narrowly construed” as it can restrict freedom of speech and expression.

In his courtroom, he had said that there would be no gag orders or sealed envelopes. Two days before his retirement, a Justice Patel-led bench held that public sector banks do not have the power to request for the issuance of look out circulars (LOCs) against loan defaulters.

Outside the courtroom, Justice Patel spoke on the right to dissent and the importance of civil society.

In a December 2019 lecture, when protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act had erupted, Justice Patel had said that “a government committed to democracy and the Constitution has nothing to fear from information (under RTI Act) and dissent”.

Born on April 26, 1962 in Mumbai, Justice Patel completed his Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Economics and Maths from St. Xavier’s College and LL.B from Government Law College (GLC), Mumbai. Justice Patel’s father, well known civil engineer Shirish B Patel is the main designer of South Mumbai’s Kemps corner flyover, the first in India, and incidentally had also worked on the High Court building to strengthen the dome of its central lift.

In one of his farewell functions, Justice Patel confessed his love for film-making and an unfulfilled desire to join Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune, before entering the legal profession. In his orders, the narration of the case is often written with a flair for drama, perhaps as an ode to his unfulfilled dream.

Justice Patel began his legal practice in 1987 through commercial and civil litigation.  After working with Dharamsukh Nanavati and his wife Sohini Nanavati- one of the first women senior advocates, he joined the chambers of senior advocate Janak Dwarkadas and later started his own.

“He worked with me as a junior. He was extremely bright and had a way with words. He displayed an uncanny knack of being able to absorb complicated facts very quickly and had a keen sense of justice. He was well read and had a literary bent of mind. His work was scholarly,” said senior advocate Janak Dwarkadas.  He is a complete family man and likes to spend time with his wife and two daughters. He is fortunate to have both of his parents alive, he added.

“It almost seems unfair that the mandatory retirement age for a High Court judge denies us several more years of Justice Gautam Patel, a Judge who is in his prime,” senior advocate Darius Khambata told the Indian Express. “His only prejudice was against slipshod drafting,” Khambata added.

He appeared for several environmental PILs and was closely associated with the Bombay Environmental Action Group (BEAG), which filed several pleas for the protection of Sanjay Gandhi National Park, Melghat National Park, open spaces and mangroves. He also appeared in PILs related to town planning and Mill lands.

“The city of Mumbai benefitted because of various orders passed in these matters. The mangroves cover would have been lost long ago but for the alertness of BEAG,” said senior advocate and president of Bombay Bar Association (BBA), Nitin Thakker in Justice Patel’s farewell function.  “Even as a lawyer, he was ahead of our times in terms of adapting with new technology and as a judge he was compassionate while giving reliefs to poor people,” he added.

With a particular focus on civic issues, in several orders, he pulled up developers not completing slum rehabilitation projects in due time and also reprimanded the BMC for issuing ‘part’ occupancy certificates ( OC) in projects without proper water connections, compelling it to make changes in the procedures. Justice Patel also initiated suo motu (on its own) pleas on issues related to redevelopment of cessed properties, the menace of unlicensed hawkers on streets  and unauthorised construction on government land in municipal corporation areas. This month, he took notice of two minor boys  drowning in a water tank in a civic garden without proper cover and ensured that the BMC approved a Rs 10 lakh compensation for the parents.

On March 16, 2018, Justice Patel, opened an old civil suit heard by him and issued a ‘corrected’ order admitting that he was ‘wrong’ in passing the previous order. “…It is sometimes said that a ‘foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds’. That might be true. But an obstinate adherence to the demonstrably incorrect position in law, even – or, worse, especially – if that pronouncement is one’s own, is perhaps infinitely worse, for it would result in the perpetuation of wrong law,” he noted. “It was an act of honesty and courage,” Thakker said.

In his final judgement on the Dawoodi-Bohra community’s religious leadership dispute which he heard since 2014, Justice Patel noted, ” It began and ended with one judge (and to put it more piquantly, of the judgeship itself almost beginning and certainly ending with the case) rather than passing from one judge to another.”

On his second innings post retirement, Justice Patel said that he would not spend the entire day in arbitration and would instead teach law students.