Justice Karnan’s incident brought judicial misconduct to the forefront

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Justice C. S. Karnan. | Photo Credit: M. Vedhan

The ‘Justice Karnan episode’, as a few retired judges reminisce, saw a tense judiciary at crossroads nearly a decade ago in the early months of 2017.

The public utterances of Calcutta High Court judge, Justice C. S. Karnan, who died on November 13, had turned “the judiciary into a laughing stock”.

His letters to high constitutional authorities, including the President, containing scandalous insinuations against Supreme Court and High Court judges were getting shriller and more pointed. He accused judges of casteism and corruption. The media, both Indian and foreign, were “merrily riding the Karnan wave”.

A seven-judge Bench headed by then Chief Justice of India J. S. Khehar and six of his senior-most companion judges had convened, in an unprecedented move, to decide if they could convict one of their own for criminal contempt, and worse, for “scandalising the Court” itself.

Advice from the Bar to the seven judges was split. The then Attorney General of India, Mukul Rohatgi, urged the Court to deliver punishment. But senior advocate K. K. Venugopal, who would succeed Mr. Rohatgi as the government’s law officer, counselled the Bench to defer a decision on contempt till Justice Karnan retired in hardly three months, in June 2017. Mr. Venugopal found it wiser to let him go rather than tarnish the image of the judicial institution by punishing a sitting judge for contempt.

The Bench had to make a decision: Let Justice Karnan retire, and spare the judiciary the ignominy of having convicted a sitting High Court judge. Or, travel into “virgin territory” and embrace the “unpleasant task” of throwing a sitting judge into jail for contempt.

Deciding the suo motu contempt case, the seven-judge Bench sentenced Justice Karnan, a serving High Court judge, to six months in prison for criminal contempt. The first in the nation’s history. Chief Justice Khehar voiced his anguish — “This has never happened. This should never happen”.

This, when Justice Karnan, while facing contempt, had ordered the registration of criminal cases against the seven judges on the Bench and even directed the Air Control Authority to forbid the CJI and the other judges on the Bench from travelling abroad.

In July 2017, in a separate opinion forming part of the judgment, Justice J. Chelameswar (now retired) explained why the Bench had to act without delay. “His [Justice Karnan’s] conduct and action, if tolerated, would certainly reflect an element of weakness in the system,” the judge said.

This dark episode, which almost cornered the judicial institution and blanched it with embarrassment, also threw open a larger question — the kind of judges the Collegium system of appointments was churning out.

Justice Chelameswar, in a separate opinion with Justice Ranjan Gogoi (now retired), called for the “need to revisit the process of selection and appointment of judges to the constitutional courts, for that matter, any member of the judiciary at all levels”.

The Karnan incident shocked the Supreme Court into highlighting the need for an “appropriate legal regime”, other than the long-drawn removal process, to deal with judicial misconduct.

“There can be deviations in the conduct of the holders of the offices of constitutional courts which do not strictly call for impeachment of the individual or such impeachment is not feasible. Surely there must be other ways of dealing with such cases. The text of the Constitution is silent in this regard. Maybe it is time for the nation to debate this issue,” Justice Chelameswar wrote in May 2017.

However, the years following the 2017 judgment continue to produce alleged instances of judicial misconduct. These include allegations of hate speech against Allahabad High Court judge, Justice Shekhar Kumar Yadav, and the alleged discovery of sacks of burnt currency from the residential premises of former Delhi High Court judge, Justice Yashwant Varma, in 2025.

In fact, two of the Supreme Court judges on the seven-member Bench which convicted Justice Karnan in 2017, faced allegations against them.

A removal notice was filed against Justice Dipak Misra in April 2018, when he was Chief Justice of India. This was the first time a removal notice was filed against a sitting Chief Justice of India.

Justice Ranjan Gogoi, who had seconded Justice Chelameswar’s view in July 2017 that a suitable mechanism should be in place to “assess the personality” of candidates considered for judgeships in constitutional courts, had to weather allegations of sexual harassment by a court staffer when he was Chief Justice of India. He attracted public criticism by being part of a Special Bench which suo motu heard the allegations reported by media outlets against him. The opinion shared by Justices Chelameswar and Gogoi had accused Justice Karnan of being a ‘judge in his own cause’.

But even back then Justice Chelameswar had warned that Justice Karnan was not a one-off episode.

“There are various other instances (mercifully which are less known to the public) of conduct of some of the members of the judiciary which certainly would cause some embarrassment to the system,” the judge had said.

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