Govt tells CJI: review Punjab CJ’s transfer

The Indira Gandhi Government had formulated this policy on the premise that a Chief Justice from outside the state was less likely to be prone to local pulls and pressures.

Bhardwaj urged the collegium, comprising Chief Justice Lahoti and the four senior-most judges of the Supreme Court, to ‘‘review’’ its decision to move Chief Justice Roy to his parent High Court.

In the last week of September, the collegium decided to transfer Justice Roy as part of a larger exercise in which some Chief Justices were reshuffled and some new ones appointed.

At the same meeting, the collegium had also taken the landmark decision to transfer 10 High Court judges on complaints, including Justices G S Singhvi and V K Bali from Chandigarh for leading in April the first ever strike by members of the higher judiciary.

Though the collegium’s decision to transfer Justices Singhvi and Bali along with two other judges of the Punjab and Haryana High Court—Justices V M Jain and Justice Nirmal Singh—has been communicated to the Law Ministry, it will be a while before the President can formally order the transfer of any of them.

For, sources said, although the papers related to the four judges were forwarded by Justice Lahoti, the Law Ministry is waiting for the CJI to complete the ‘‘process of consultation.’’

Under this, any transfer proposal is considered complete only when the chief justice of the high court the judge is leaving and the chief of the court to which he is being shifted are apprised of the collegium’s decision.

Consequently, the Law Ministry has so far acted only on that part of the collegium’s recommendations where the consultation process has been complied with.

The judges who are, thus, in the process of being transferred include two who are being moved next week, to Chandigarh from the Jharkhand High Court and Madhya Pradesh High Court.

The collegium’s decision to transfer Justices Singhvi and Bali for leading the strike by 25 High Court judges on April 19 is in keeping with the ‘‘anguish’’ expressed over it by President APJ Abdul Kalam in a rare letter to the then Chief Justice of India, V N Khare.

The judges had gone on a mass casual leave to protest in-house notices served on two of them by Chief Justice B K Roy to explain why they had taken free membership in a club embroiled in litigation.

Significantly, the collegium had chosen to transfer Justices Singhvi and Bali to the Gujarat High Court where the two would lose their seniority.