The former Calcutta High Court judge spent six months behind bars at Kolkata’s Presidency Jail, sent there by the Supreme Court for contempt

Calcutta High Court’s former judge, Justice CS Karnan, was on Wednesday (December 20) released from Kolkata’s Presidency Jail where he spent six months on a contempt case. He was sent to jail by a Supreme Court bench headed by the then Chief Justice JS Khehar after Karnan repeatedly disobeyed several orders of the top court.

Karnan has maintained that justice has been denied him by the Supreme Court and that as a Dalit he had been discriminated against by his brother judges at his former posting as Judge of the Madras High Court. None of his allegations could be proved, but Karnan had sent a letter to Prime Minster Narendra Modi alleging that 20 judges of that high court plus other judges were involved in corruption. That allegation also fell through when Karnan refused to meet the top court judges at the CJI’s chamber (as was asked to) and apprise the top court of his allegations in person.

Karnan’s appeal to President Ram Nath Kovind (the first appeal to the new President) did not manage to find the President’s ear.

The only place where Karnan was mentioned thereafter was at the Constitution Day speech of Union Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad at Vigyan Bhavan on November 26, when the minister used the Karnan incident to point out alleged anomalies and shortfalls within the Collegium system of appointment of judges by the Supreme Court and other courts. Hence Karnan’s mention at a top forum was only a negative one. Prasad, though, also mentioned that perhaps it would have been necessary to find out if allegations (of judicial corruption) were true.

In the end Karnan’s issue boiled down at the top forum to only a footnote in the judiciary-executive tussle that has continued unabated from the time of former Chief Justice TS Thakur to the current incumbent, Justice Dipak Misra. Whether Justice Karnan’s allegations – of an ill-treated Dalit judge or about corruption within the judiciary – had any meat will now unlikely to be ever discussed at any forum.

The bigger question, therefore, arising out of this is whether the Collegium will henceforth find a solution to selecting judges apart from its general application of experience in advocacy at courts and/or in the judicial system. It must be noted that whatever psychoanalysis that Justice Karnan was subject to at his Kolkata official residence – at the insistence of the apex court – proved inconclusive. His intellectual acumen has not been questioned in judicial circles. What, then happened?

It will be left to time and possibly Karnan’s further disclosures to unravel this.

—India Legal Bureau