Who is Somasekhar Sundaresan, whose ‘views on social media’ held up appointment as Bombay HC judge

A 1996-batch graduate in law from Government Law College, Mumbai, Sundaresan worked as a journalist for over five years before taking up practice, starting with the port sector. As a lawyer, he specialises in areas such as financial sector regulation, competition law, company matters, and exchange controls.

After a stint as a partner at law firm JSA, where he took up matters related to securities law and private equity, Sundaresan set up practice of his own. The Mumbai-based Sundaresan has been a member of committees set up by the Union government, SEBI and RBI, drafted laws governing takeovers, insider trading and corporate governance of banks, and was actively involved in formulating the Indian Financial Code recommended by the Financial Sector Legislative Reform Commission.

Sundaresan is currently serving on the Advisory Committee of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Board of India on corporate insolvency and liquidation. He is also a member of the Board of Studies in the Institute of Law, Nirma University, and a member of the Advisory Board of Indian Law Review, a journal on Indian law with comparative perspectives. Sundaresan also teaches securities law.

In September last year, Sundaresan, who is an amateur mountaineer, represented the Competition Commission of India (CCI) before the Bombay High Court in a plea by broadcasting companies against a CCI order initiating a probe against them.

Sundaresan also represented the CCI in its plea to vacate an order restraining it from taking coercive action against the Trustees Association of India, along with three trustee firms, IDBI, Axis and, SBICap, in furtherance of an order initiating investigation against them.

In April 2021, he appeared for an activist working with child victims of sexual abuse and their families, who filed a petition over the lack of implementation of certain provisions of the POCSO Act.

The Bombay High Court Collegium had first recommended Sundaresan’s name as a judge on October 4, 2021. On February 16, 2022, the Supreme Court Collegium cleared his name and proposed it to the government.

In July, nearly five months later, the Central government held back Sundaresan’s name while clearing those of nine for appointment as additional judges of the Bombay High Court. On November 25, 2022, it asked the Supreme Court Collegium to reconsider Sundaresan’s name.

In its statement on January 18, making the government’s objections to Sundaresan public, the Supreme Court Collegium headed by Chief Justice of India D Y Chandrachud said “the views on social media attributed to the candidate do not furnish any foundation to infer that he is biased” and noted that the “issues on which opinions have been attributed to the candidate are in public domain and have been extensively deliberated upon in print and electronic media”.

Sundaresan, who has written opinion pieces for leading newspapers, had in August 2014, written for a business newspaper that “muck-raking around any appointment to a prestigious office is natural”. The piece was in the context of ”insinuations” that criminal lawyer Uday Umesh Lalit (who later became CJI) being named judge of the Supreme Court was inappropriate since he was a lawyer for former Gujarat home minister Amit Shah in cases involving allegations of illegal police killings of Sohrabuddin Sheikh and Tulsiram Prajapati. Sundaresan wrote in defence of Justice Lalit, arguing that a lawyer cannot be judged by the clients he represented.

Commenting on the government’s objections to Sundaresan, the Collegium said that “the manner in which the candidate has expressed his views does not justify the inference that he is a ‘highly biased opinionated person’ or that he has been ‘selectively critical on the social media on the important policies, initiatives and directions of the government’ (as indicated by the objections raised by the Department of Justice)… nor is there any material to indicate that the expressions used are suggestive of his links with any political party with strong ideological leanings”.