Newsmaker: Justice RC Lahoti

Behind the gavel, an aloof mind

Lahoti upheld a Haryana law that banned people with more than two children from contesting local elections

Nine years after he retired as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court on November 1, 2005, Justice Ramesh Chandra Lahoti finds himself back in the news. The government has appointed the 73-year-old judge as arbitrator in one of the most talked about and long-pending disputes - the tax disagreement between the Indian government and British telecom giant, Vodafone.

There must be many people leafing through the verdicts delivered by Justice Lahoti during his just over a year-long tenure as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court to get a hint of how he might be inclined in the tax case. They may not be very successful. For, Justice Lahoti was very economical with words and almost inaudible when presiding over the highest court of the country.

But Justice Lahoti's reticence masked a mind that delivered many landmark decisions and took controversial stands on issues. He was the first chief justice to officially refute the views of his predecessors that the Indian judiciary was opening itself to corruption and had claimed it to be 'clean'. His handling of judicial transfers had also come in for a lot of criticism.

The judicial expert is also known for upholding a Haryana law that did not permit people with more than two children to contest local body elections. Contrary to popular views, Justice Lahoti had rejected arguments that such a law impinged on an individual's right to privacy and to religion. Another landmark decision he took was to quash the Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act. The legislation, enforced in Assam after the agitation against foreign settlers in the 1970s, was meant to check the indiscriminate deportation of migrants. He ruled that the law was actually being used by illegal migrants to protect themselves from identification as foreigners. As the Chief Justice, Lahoti had also earned the eternal gratitude of devotees of the Kanchi Shankaracharya by granting the seer bail in a murder case to end weeks of humiliation at the hands of the Tamil Nadu police.

From the verdicts he pronounced, Justice Lahoti came across as an independent thinker to whom the application of law was uppermost.

A graduate in law and commerce, he started his court career at Guna in Madhya Pradesh. He was appointed an additional judge of the Madhya Pradesh High Court in 1988, becoming the permanent judge the following year. In 1994, Justice Lahoti was transferred to the Delhi High Court, and was elevated to the Supreme Court in February 1998.