Justice must not only be done but be seen to be done which is why judges who dispense justice should not be wary of interlopers like reporters publicizing their private lives. For those who dispense justice in public may perpetrate injustice to women in private. This was proved when the late Justice S.K. Desai of the Bombay high court was forced to resign in June 1990 after being transferred to the Kerala high court because of his unsavoury liaison with a woman litigant, Thelma Menezes.
Desai was the acting governor of Maharashtra but got entangled in a web of his own making, which forced him to quit the judiciary after the late advocate general Arvind Bobde wrote letters about Desai’s friend Thelma Menezes allegedly threatening Desai’s brother judge M.P. Kenia. Interestingly, Bobde was the father of Justice Sharad Bobde from Nagpur who is presently in the Supreme Court and will become the chief justice of India in November 2019. He knows more than he will ever reveal.
The next judge who got into a quandary was also from the Bombay high court. While sitting on a two-judge bench, he allegedly overruled his own order which was passed as a single judge to favour a bewitching woman lawyer who impressed him. The opponent of the winsome woman advocate cheekily remarked in court when he lost, ” you have decided this revision not on law points but after looking at the face of the (lady) advocate.”
The late editor of Loksatta, Madhav Gadkari, published this in his weekly column, Chaupher, in 1986 and had to face a contempt notice which resulted in the dictum three years later that truth is no defence when facing a contempt notice. This judge-made law suppressed press freedom from 1989 to 2006 when Parliament amended the law to allow truth as a defence.
Ironically, advocate V.M. Kanade who filed the contempt petition against Gadkari was later made a judge of the Bombay high court but never rose to become a chief justice despite his seniority. He now leads a retired life playing bridge. He probably knows why another judge, justice Abhay Thipsay was unceremoniously shunted to the Allahabad high court shortly before retirement. But Kanade will not reveal secrets.
The most publicized scandal was that of retired Supreme Court judge Asok Kumar Ganguly who misbehaved with a young woman law intern, Stella James, in Kolkata which prompted her to put up a blog about the incident. While sipping wine with her on Christmas eve, the 66-year-old judge allegedly told the young woman she was very beautiful and he was attracted to her. When she rose to leave, he allegedly kissed her hand which made her run down the stairs with the unseemly spectacle of the old judge running down after her to apologize.
Justice Ganguly later phoned her at her paying guest accommodation to apologize but the savvy woman law intern did not accept his calls. For Justice Ganguly was a married man who had grown up children and was known to have delivered vitriolic judgments against ministers like A. Raja accused of corruption.
As a result of the media having a field day over this indiscretion of Justice Ganguly, another Supreme Court judge, Swatanter Kumar, was accused by another woman law intern of misbehaving with her. But unlike Ganguly, a wily Kumar hired a battery of senior lawyers to file a defamation case against those news channels to injunct them from publicizing the law intern’s allegations. Intimidated by the huge amount of damages claimed by this retired judge, the woman law intern was browbeaten into submission.
Abhishek Manu Singhvi was not a judge but a senior counsel and Congress spokesperson. But he was literally caught with his pants down in April 2012 when his driver allegedly recorded him having sexual intercourse with a woman lawyer inside a deserted court chamber. This made Singhvi rush to the court to secure an injunction to take down the seedy CD from the internet.
Seven years later, Singhvi argued the impeachment motion against CJI Dipak Misra but abandoned it midway perhaps on the assumption that men will be men and if he was caught in flagrante delicto with a woman lawyer, it would not do to expose the CJI for allotting sensitive matters of national importance to benches of his choice. Here, injustice was seen to be done because Singhvi did not argue the matter on merits.
The latest sex scandal to erupt is the kiss-and-tell book by Reham Khan, the divorced third wife of Pakistani cricketer-turned- law maker Imran Khan who, she says, has a large brood of illegitimate children spread all over the world. Some of them in India. Imran Khan appears to be the Pakistani counterpart of an Indian politician, who is accused of abetting the suicide of his wife.
If Reham is to be believed, Imran did not discriminate between men and women while jumping into bed and also believed in black magic because he smeared his body with black ash to ward off a curse he believed plagued him. Reham has written Imran is the anti-thesis of Prime Minister Narendra Modi who tied the knot but never lived with his dehati wife Jashodaben, who lives a quiet, retired life under veritable house arrest in Gujarat because she is constantly followed by men from the Intelligence Bureau.
So, there you have it. While those who make the law like Imran Khan are not above board, at least some judges who interpret the law and the lawyers who assist them in doing so, do not hesitate to break the law in private while upholding it in public.
Olav Albuquerque holds a Ph.D in law and is a journalist-cum-lawyer of the Bombay high court.
