In an unprecedented development, Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi has appeared before the Justice S.A. Bobde in-house inquiry committee examining sexual harassment allegations levelled against the top judge by a former apex court employee.
A letter of request was issued to the Chief Justice of India and he responded to it and met the panel, a highly-placed source told The Hindu on Wednesday.
High constitutional office-holders like the CJI are not issued summons as is the usual case. They are sent a 'letter of request' to participate in the proceedings.
The development comes a day after the complainant declined to participate in the in-house proceedings.
“She declined to participate following which the committee conveyed to her that the consequences of her decision would be that the committee would have to continue the hearings ex parte. She agreed,” the source said.
The source however refused to divulge when exactly, what day, the CJI participated in the proceedings.
The committee also comprises Justices Indira Banerjee and Indu Malhotra as members, while Justice Bobde is the chair.
It has been holding the hearings on a daily basis from Monday. On the third hearing on April 30, the complainant had refused to further participate in the ‘informal’ proceedings. She had issued a press statement citing that one of the reasons for her withdrawal was that the panel allegedly refused her request to have a lawyer or a support person accompany her during the hearings.
“I was compelled to walk out of the committee proceedings today (April 30) because the committee seemed not to appreciate the fact that this was not an ordinary complaint but a complaint of sexual harassment against a sitting CJI,” she had stated in a press release.
The report, when done, would likely be placed before a Full Court and vetted by all the Supreme Court judges.
The crisis in the Supreme Court began when a clutch of websites published the woman’s allegations against the CJI on Easter Day morning.
Within an hour of the articles coming online on April 20, the Chief Justice Gogoi held an “extraordinary and unusual hearing” in the Supreme Court, during which he claimed the allegations were part of a larger plot to “deactivate the office of the Chief Justice of India.”