Opinion Express View on Calcutta HC judge joining BJP: An improper move

On January 24, Abhijit Gangopadhyay — then a justice of the Calcutta High Court — accused a brother judge of “working for a political party”. That moment marked a low for the judiciary, and for the relationship between the government and the Court in West Bengal. Over the last week, though, it may have been surpassed — on Tuesday, less than a week after he resigned from the bench, Gangopadhyay announced he was joining the BJP. The judge’s decision to join politics — and the manner and context in which it was taken — raises questions of judicial propriety, and impartiality.

To be fair, Gangopadhyay is not the first judge of a constitutional court to resign and join politics. In 1967, former Chief Justice of India Koka Subba Rao resigned three months before he was to retire to contest the presidential election as the Opposition candidate. Supreme Court Justice Baharul Islam resigned six weeks before retirement in 1983 to contest the Lok Sabha polls. Post retirement, judges have become governors and Rajya Sabha members. Gangopadhyay’s case, however, stands out for at least two reasons: For one, his record in the court has been full of controversy. Second, for the better part of two years, these controversies showcased an unseemly spectacle of a sitting judge at loggerheads with an elected government, in a manner that invited questions of partisanship. Take the jobs scam case from September 2022. While hearing the matter, Justice Gangopadhyay all but accused TMC leader Abhishek Banerjee of “amassing wealth” in an interview to a TV channel — this lack of “judicial propriety” led the Supreme Court to order the Chief Justice of the Calcutta High Court to assign the case to a different bench. In January, he overruled a larger bench in a case regarding admissions to state medical colleges, and made an irresponsible remark against a colleague (mentioned above).

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Judge Gangopadhyay’s foray into politics now casts a shadow over the decisions he made on the bench. His justification for his political turn — the insults and barbs of TMC spokespersons and leaders, he says, led him to the BJP — holds little water. Politicians play politics, and the TMC has often accused Gangopadhyay of being a “political worker” in Court. A justice of a constitutional court, however, should not rise to the bait. By doing so, and by his decision now, he has given the accusations against him an air of retrospective credibility.