Supreme gossip

With recent developments highlighting the role of Chief Justice of India vis-a-vis his brethren, the chapter titled 'The Fictional Concurrence of the Chief Justice' is interesting

Some three decades ago, an American scholar interviewed 66 serving and former judges of the Indian Supreme Court who served from 1950 to 1989. He also interviewed relatives of deceased judges, lawyers, politicians and court staff. George H Gadbois Jr then meticulously typed up the notes of the interviews, which had lasted from a few hours to a few days. Some of the judges also corresponded with him. From these notes of interviews, and other research, Gadbois eventually wrote two books — Supreme Court of India — The Beginnings, and Judges of the Supreme Court of India 1950-1989.

Gadbois must have been a good listener, for these notoriously reticent and tightlipped judges opened up and talked to him. And oh, how they talked!  They spoke about themselves, about fellow judges, about politicians, about lawyers, and about the state of the judicial system. To his credit, even though he collected a large amount of material, salacious or otherwise, Gadbois was circumspect about the material he used in the two books he wrote, which are scholarly, and possibly the best books on recent judicial history. Gadbois bequeathed those typed notes to Abhinav Chadrachud, who has used a part of the notes to write Supreme Whispers — Conversations with Judges of the Indian Supreme Court 1980-1989. One assumes that one of the reasons that the author picked the period of 1980-1989 was that it partly coincided with his grandfather’s seven-year tenure as the Chief Justice of India. However, there is no discernible bias in the book as it includes a fair amount of criticism of Chief Justice Chandrachud by other judges, as recounted to Gadbois.

For the lay person, the book satisfies the prurient interest, showing how judges of the Supreme Court are only too human, with attendant frailties such as jealousy, one-upmanship, casteism and so on. For the legal scholar, however, the book is a treasure trove of material, giving an acute insight into what made “their lordships” tick and, more importantly, how the interpersonal dynamic played out within the judiciary, determining sometimes the course of legal history, and also in appointments to the judiciary.

There are tales of judges of the Supreme Court threatening to resign en masse, of judges who were not appointed to the Supreme Court because there were allegations of corruption, or sexual violence, or some other shortcoming. Justice T P S Chawla, the then Chief Justice of Delhi and an erudite scholar and a gentleman, was not appointed to the Supreme Court because he had threatened to shoot a dog belonging to his neighbour, a Supreme Court judge.

Over three decades ago, the judges were decrying the fact that the government of the day sat upon appointments or sabotaged them in some manner or the other. The judges of the Supreme Court told Gadbois about how there were opposed to appointments based on caste, or religion, or regional origin. In 1988, Justice O Chinnappa Reddy told Gadbois that “judges trying to please the government was the ‘new ethos’ of the Supreme Court, that this was happening especially in big political cases”.

The author has taken this material, done additional research, and has written an eminently readable book from it. He also makes it clear that there are also some inherent problems with the source material — the interviews were not voice-recorded, there is an assumption that Gadbois was accurate and truthful, the judges interviewed may not necessarily have been truthful or may have been slanting their tales in their own favour and so on. In other words, there is a possibility that this is all just gossip that was recorded by Gadbois. But whether gossip or not, the book tells a story that the reader will recognise as familiar. With recent developments highlighting the role of Chief Justice of India vis-à-vis his brethren, the chapter titled “The Fictional Concurrence of the Chief Justice” is interesting reading.

“Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose” — the more things change, the more they stay the same. While Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr did not have the Indian judicial system in mind when he coined this epigram, a person reading this fascinating book would be hard put to deny the aptness of this phrase when comparing the present and the past as recounted in the book.

One hopes that there will be further volumes of the unprinted material from the Gadbois papers covering the earlier periods of independent India’s legal history. As the author says in the introductory chapter, “most of the judges who were interviewed have passed away”, but the stories are “still highly relevant today”.
 

(The reviewer is a lawyer  practicing in Delhi)

Supreme Whispers

Supreme Court Judges, 1980-1989 

Abhinav Chandrachud 

Penguin Viking 

256 pages; Rs 599