Former CJI A M Ahmadi dies at 90

In 1976, he was appointed a judge of the Gujarat High Court and was elevated to the Supreme Court in 1988. He was the CJI from October 1994 to March 1997.

In his nine-year tenure in the Supreme Court, Justice Ahmadi was part of seminal verdicts that changed the course of polity. A critic of the Collegium system of appointing judges, Justice Ahmadi, who was in line to be CJI then, had written a dissenting opinion in the 1993 landmark nine-judge bench ruling that established the Collegium system of appointing judges. Justice Ahmadi had said that the majority view by Justice J S Verma “follows a path leading to a destination unknown to the Constitution”.

He also wrote a dissent in the 1994 ruling in ‘Ismail Faruqui vs Union of India’ which held that offering prayers in a mosque was not an essential religious practice of Islam and upheld the law under which the Centre acquired the disputed land in Ayodhya.

In the Bhopal gas tragedy case, a bench headed by Justice Ahmadi allowed the CBI to charge Union Carbide on charges of causing death due to negligence and not culpable homicide not amounting to murder which carries a 10-year sentence. After retirement, in 1998, he became the chairman of the Union Carbide-funded Bhopal Memorial Trust Hospital.

In 1999, the United Nations appointed him a member of a panel to investigate possible human rights violations in East Timor.

In 2003, he was elected Chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University and was re-elected again in 2007.