NEW DELHI: President
Ram Nath Kovind on Thursday appointed Justice
Ranjan Gogoi, the senior most judge of Supreme Court, as the next Chief Justice of India. He will assume the office of CJI on October 3 and will have a term for over a year, till November 17, 2019.
The incumbent CJI,
Dipak Misra, retires on October 2. Justice Gogoi, who started his practice from his home state of
Assam and became a judge of the Gauhati High Court in February 2001, will be the first CJI from North-East. He comes from a political family and his father was former Congress chief minister of Assam.
Justice Gogoi, before becoming a judge, enrolled as an advocate in the Gauhati High Court in 1978 and practiced constitutional, taxation and company matters. Prior to his elevation to the SC, he was appointed to the Punjab and Haryana high court in February 2011 as its chief justice. He was appointed as judge of the apex court on April 23, 2012.
After Justice Gogoi participated in the press conference of four judges in January this year airing their grievances against the procedure followed by the CJI in allotting benches to politically sensitive cases, it was speculated that the incumbent CJI may not recommend his name as his successor. However, on September 4, CJI Misra recommended as per convention the name of Justice Gogoi as the next CJI.
Justice Gogoi is known as a strict and no-nonsense judge and it is reflected when a bench headed by him had even summoned the former judge of the apex court Markandey Katju for making controversial remarks against his judgement.
