Remembering one of India's finest judges: Former CJI PN Bhagwati

“I feel a deep sense of remorse for that sentence.”

The year was 2006. I was sitting inside a sprawling house in Greater Kailash II, Delhi. The 84-year-old man sitting opposite me looked very old, very tired and very feeble.

Was I hearing right? Prafullachandra Natwarlal Bhagwati, the 17th Chief Justice of India and one of India’s best-known human-rights jurists, admitting remorse over a death sentence he had awarded in 1975?

Suddenly, he got up, walked briskly to a wooden platform stacked with bookcases in one side of the room, and started rifling through volumes of the All India Law Reporters, to read out some paragraphs of a death verdict in Suna Alias Ramesh Chandra Mohanty Vs. the State of Orissa (1975), where he was one of the judges.

Much of what he read out went over my head, but I felt worried for him: he looked too frail to ascend the podium and stand there holding onto thick tomes. I wanted to tell him, “Sir, I am just a journalist.” But in that small instance of time, I also understood what made Prafullachandra Natwarlal Bhagwati, the 17th Chief Justice of India, such a legend. Law to him was, as poet WH Auden had once written, “like love.”

Mind of the Judge

It’s possibly this love for the law that pushed Justice PN Bhagwati to focus on the mind of the judiciary, one of the very few to have done so. He felt that judges tend to give severe sentences whenever they felt crime rates were rising and needed to be brought under control. “But there is always the possibility of human error, because judges are normal people, they can make mistakes just like politicians, doctors or reporters,” he said.

“A judge does not cease to be a human being subject to human limitations when he puts on the judicial robe and…cannot be entirely free from judicial subjectivism.” That’s what he had said in the landmark Bachan Singh vs State of Punjab case in 1980, which gave birth to the “rarest of the rare” doctrine in death penalty. Like his guru, the great jurist Justice Krishna Iyer, he believed that capital punishment violates constitutional rights to life, freedom and equality. Justice Bhagwati not only talked about the brutality and indiscretion that accompanied death sentences but also how statistical data shows capital punishment did not succeed in attaining any of the three goals of justice: reformation, retribution and deterrence.

A man of records

In his long stint as a judge Justice Bhagwati set many records: he was only 51 years old when appointed the Chief Justice of India (the current CJI JS Khehar was 64). He was also the longest-serving CJI (13 years compared to, say, seven months of the current CJI Khehar).

One of the finest judges the Supreme Court has ever seen, under his stewardship, the Supreme Court of India gave a landmark decision in 1983, which enabled delivery of justice on public grievances and key social issues. It started with a letter addressed to the higher judiciary by an NGO on the inhuman conditions of migrant labourers working at stone quarries in Faridabad. With the judges turning it into a writ petition and setting up an investigative commission to probe further, the landscape of Public Interest Litigation in India changed forever.

Justice Bhagwati was also one of the few judges who dared to say “I am sorry” for a judgment. It was the controversial ADM Jabalpur case of 1976, when the Supreme Court upheld the right of Indira Gandhi’s government to suspend all fundamental rights during the Emergency. In 2011, he had admitted to his “act of weakness,” although he was censured for making a “volte face”.

A people's judge

From the 1974 Royappa vs State case defining the citizen's right to equality to the 1978 Menaka Gandhi case, when the government denied her a passport, from redressal of illegally detained poor villagers (Hussainara Khatoon case, 1979) to the release of a thousand bonded labourers in Madurai (1985) — his judgments had again and again given common people relief against arbitrary government action, empowered the rights of citizens to equality, means of livelihood and free legal aid.

He will be remembered always for unleashing people’s power and an era of judicial regeneration.