Collegium recommends transfers of High Court CJs Bindal and Kureshi

The Supreme Court collegium has not yet formally notified its recommendations. The decisions were taken in meetings held on Thursday evening and Friday, sources said.

Justice Bindal was appointed acting Chief Justice of Calcutta High Court on April 29, just as West Bengal finished voting for the new Assembly. In the political tussle that played out in court following the victory of the Trinamool Congress, Justice Bindal’s decisions came under the scanner.

On May 24, in an unprecedented development, Justice Arindam Sinha, a senior judge of the Calcutta High Court, wrote a letter to all judges of the High Court, including Justice Bindal, raising questions over the Acting CJ’s intervention in transferring the Narada sting case to the HC, and staying the bail granted to four leaders of the TMC by a CBI court.

Incidentally, Justice Sinha is one of the 28 judges recommended for a transfer. He is likely to be moved to Orissa High Court.

The TMC leaders had been arrested by the CBI on May 17, but were given bail by a special CBI court in Kolkata that same evening. The agency had then petitioned the High Court asking that the trial be transferred to the HC, the proceedings in the lower court be nullified, and the proceedings be conducted afresh.

A division bench led by Justice Bindal had heard the matter after regular court hours, accepted the CBI’s plea, and stayed the decision of the CBI court.

Later, the HC had departed from rules to set up a five-judge bench to hear all cases connected to the Assembly elections.

Before his stint in the Calcutta HC, Justice Bindal, whose parent High Court is the Punjab and Haryana HC, was briefly Acting Chief Justice of the Jammu and Kashmir High Court in December 2020. His tenure ends on April 15, 2023, if he is not elevated to the SC.

Another significant transfer is that of Justice Kureshi, who was at the centre of a two-year impasse within the Supreme Court collegium over the appointment of judges.

Justice Kureshi, whose parent High Court is the Gujarat High Court, did not feature in the list of nine appointments made to the Supreme Court in August despite being No. 2 in the All-India list of seniority for judges of High Courts. The collegium’s hesitation in recommending his name had led to an unprecedented impasse over the appointments, which lasted for nearly two years.

Former SC judge Rohinton Nariman, who was part of the collegium, had insisted that Justice Kureshi’s name be recommended before any other. A week after Justice Nariman retired on August 12, the SC collegium sent nine names to the government, which were accepted within two weeks.

This is not the first time that the collegium has recommended Justice Kureshi to be appointed Chief Justice of a large High Court. In 2019, it had recommended his appointment as Chief Justice of Madhya Pradesh High Court; however, the government had returned the file to the collegium for reconsideration.

The collegium had then withdrawn its recommendation, and instead recommended Justice Kureshi for the Tripura High Court, a High Court with just four judges. Rajasthan High Court has a sanctioned strength of 50 judges.

Justice Kureshi was appointed Chief Justice of Tripura High Court on November 16, 2019, and his tenure ends on March 6, 2022, if not elevated to the Supreme Court.

The eight recommendations for appointment as Chief Justices of High Courts are:

• Justice Prakash Srivastava, judge, Madhya Pradesh High Court, as Chief Justice of Calcutta High Court;
• Justice Prashant Kumar Mishra, Acting Chief Justice of Chattisgarh High Court as Chief Justice of Andhra Pradesh High Court;
• Justice Ritu Raj Awasthi, judge of the Allahabad High Court as Chief Justice of Karnataka High Court;
• Justice Satish Sharma, acting Chief Justice of Karnataka High Court, as Chief Justice of Telangana High Court;
• Justice Ranjit More, judge of Meghalaya High Court (whose parent HC is Bombay), as Chief Justice of that High Court;
• Justice Aravind Kumar, judge of Karnataka High Court, as Chief Justice of Gujarat High Court;
• Justice R V Malimath, Acting Chief Justice of Himachal Pradesh High Court (whose parent HC is Karnataka), as Chief Justice of Madhya Pradesh High Court.

Apart from Justices Bindal and Kureshi, the other Chief Justices who were recommended for a transfer include:

• Justice Arup Kumar Goswami, who will move from Andhra Pradesh HC to Chhattisgarh HC;
• Justice Mohammad Rafiq, who will move from Madhya Pradesh HC to Himachal Pradesh HC;
• Justice Indrajit Mohanty, from Rajasthan HC to Tripura HC;
• Justice Biswanath Somadder, from Meghalaya HC to Sikkim HC.