The topmost rung of the judiciary on Thursday carried on with its peace talks in an effort to deal with the issue of how to restore the credibility of the courts following the unprecedented press conference by the four senior-most judges of the Supreme Court last week.
For the second time in three days, Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra met the four senior-most judges—Justices J. Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, Madan B. Lokur and Kurian Joseph—to discuss the issues bothering the four dissenting judges who are his colleagues in the Supreme Court collegium.
The four judges had on January 12 stunned everyone and sent the judiciary into a tizzy by holding an unprecedented press conference, where they publicly expressed no confidence in the manner in which the Supreme Court was being administered by Chief Justice Misra—the crux of the matter being assigning of politically-sensitive cases to selected benches.
The meeting on Thursday, which lasted around 15 minutes, was held before the court assembled for the day at 10:30am.
According to sources, the four judges proposed some ideas for making the system for assigning of cases more rational, credible and transparent. It is learnt that no proposal was given in writing by the four judges to Misra, and they only orally presented their views before the chief justice.
An idea learnt to have been discussed is the setting up of specialised benches to hear different categories of cases.
The tipping point for the four judges, prompting them to decide to hold the January 12 press conference and go public with their grievances, is the case related to the death of Judge B.H. Loya, who had been hearing the matter of the alleged fake encounter of Sohrabuddin Sheikh.
A petition seeking an independent probe into the circumstances of the death of Loya was assigned to court number ten of the Supreme Court, which is presided over by Justice Arun Mishra. The four judges are learnt to be of the view that since the case is so highly politically sensitive, it ought to have been assigned to a senior judge to avoid questions on the handling of the matter by the court.
Meanwhile, a bench headed by Chief Justice Misra refused to hear a plea asking for restraining the media from publishing, discussing and politicising the developments arising out of the press conference addressed by the four dissenting judges.
The court said it would hear the petition only after it had been admitted by the Registry and listed for hearing.
