‘There comes a moment in every judge’s life…’: Madhya Pradesh judge resigns after judge she accused of harassment is elevated

The Indian Express reached out to Gupta on his official email with a questionnaire on the letter and is yet to get a response.

Sharma was among six women judges whose services were terminated by the Madhya Pradesh government in June 2023. In her resignation, Sharma wrote: “With every ounce of my moral strength and emotional exhaustion, I hereby resign from judicial service not because I lost faith in justice, but because justice lost its way inside the very institution sworn to protect it.”

“There comes a moment in every judge’s life when she is called to make a choice — not between right and wrong, but between silence and truth. Today, I choose truth, even if it comes at the cost of the very robe I once wore with reverence,” she wrote.

Sharma said that she wrote the letter “with a shattered spirit and the ache of betrayal. Not at the hands of a criminal or an accused, but at the hands of the very system I swore to serve”.

She said she was “resigning from judicial service, not because I failed the institution—but because the institution has failed me”. “For years, I was subjected to unrelenting harassment — not merely of the body or the mind, but of my dignity, my voice, and my very existence as a woman judge who dared to speak up against a senior judge….,” she wrote.

Following her written appeals to multiple authorities, including the Chief Justice of India, she hoped “that if not justice, at least hearing might be granted”. “But silence was their verdict.”

“In that silence, I saw the brutal truth of our times—that integrity is optional, power is protection, and those who speak the truth are punished more severely than those who violate it,” she wrote.

Sharma alleged that the “same judiciary that sermonises about transparency from the bench failed to even follow the basic tenets of natural justice within its own halls”.

“What message does this send to the judiciary’s daughters? That they may be assaulted, humiliated, and institutionally erased — and their only real crime was daring to believe that the system would protect them?” the letter said.

“Let this letter haunt the files it enters. Let it whisper in the hallways where silence once reigned. Let it live longer than the reputations hastily protected, and the wrongs quietly buried. I sign off not as an officer of the court, but as a victim of its silence… This letter of resignation is not closure. It is a statement of protest. Let it remain in your archives as a reminder that there once was a woman judge in Madhya Pradesh who gave her all to justice, and was broken by the system that preached it the loudest,” she wrote.