'Had no problem with judges, was raising institutional issues,' says Justice Chelameswar

Supreme Court (SC) judge Justice Jasti Chelameswar said on June 22 that he never had any personal problems with any of the three Chief Justices of India (CJI), according to a report by News18.

Chelameswar was one of the four SC judges who had held an unprecedented press conference in January and spoke against CJI Dipak Misra over his style of administration.

“At a personal level, I had no problem with any one of those judges,” Chelameswar said.

“I was raising certain institutional issues. A line is to be drawn there. That’s all,” he added.

In January’s press conference, Chelameswar, along with the other three judges had said that Indian democracy is in danger.

"The four of us are convinced that unless this institution is preserved and it maintains its equanimity, democracy will not survive in this country," Chelameswar had said.

In a separate interview to India Today, Chelameswar reacted to allegations of him being involved with the opposition, by saying that who met him was “immaterial.”

“The more important question would be, who is meeting those who are in power?” he said.

Chelameswar also said in the interview to India Today that after serving 42 years in the judiciary, parting with the institution has made him a “little lost”.

Previously, the retired judge had declined to attend collegium meetings during Justice TS Thakur’s tenure as CJI, citing opaqueness and lack of objectivity as the reasons.

Chelameswar had also written a letter to Justice JS Khehar’s during his tenure as the CJI, complaining about the selection process of the collegium.

“If you (Justice Khehar) believed these collegium meetings are beyond all principles of law propounded by their court, God save this country,” he had written in the letter.

Acting on these lines, Chelameswar was the only dissenting voice in 2015 that ruled in favour of the National Judicial Appointments Commission (NJAC).