Gautam Bhatia scans Bobde's tenure as the CJI: Not worth missing

[Sukla Sen]

Gautam Bhatia can always be relied on for a scrupulously objective and thoroughly systematic dissection of the cases before him on the table.

<<At midnight today, Sharad Bobde will no longer be the Chief Justice of India.

As on previous occasions (see here and here), this post will assess the legacy of the outgoing Chief Justice. In the case of Chief Justice Bobde, this might seem a somewhat difficult task. What can one even say about a tenure that lasted seventeen months, through a particularly stormy time, and yielded precisely zero judgments of constitutional import, other than a late set of guidelines on the appointment of ad-hoc judges? But, as we shall see, the absence of constitutional judgments does not mean that CJI Bobde did not enjoy a hugely consequential tenure. Through a refusal to hear cases (judicial evasion), shoddily reasoned “interim orders” (hypocrisy), and the arbitrary allocation of cases under the “master of the roster” powers (duplicity), CJI Bobde’s tenure saw the further acceleration of trends begun under his predecessors: that of the Supreme Court, in effect, turning into an Executive Court (see here). The difference between CJI Bobde and his predecessors was that under the latter, there were still occasions when the Supreme Court continued to act like a “court”, as we understand it. Under CJI Bobde, there was very little evidence of that.>>

<https://indconlawphil.wordpress.com/2021/04/23/evasion-hypocrisy-and-duplicity-the-legacy-of-chief-justice-bobde/?s=04>