Former SC judge Sawant dies aged 90

MUMBAI: Former judge of Supreme Court Justice PB Sawant, who was one of the co-conveners of the Elgar Parishad in 2017, passed away following a cardiac arrest on Monday.  Justice Sawant,  90,  breathed his last at his family home in Pune. His last rites will be performed in Pune on Tuesday.

After a thriving legal practice in Mumbai, Justice Sawant was appointed judge of Bombay High Court in 1973 and later elevated to the Supreme Court in 1989. Among his notable early achievements was probing the crash of the Air India aircraft ‘Gauri Shankar’ on a Kuala Lumpur-Mumbai flight, which crashed during hard-landing at Mumbai’s Sahar International Airport on June 21, 1982, during a thunderstorm, killing at least 17 passengers.

Associated with many human rights, civil liberties, public and social causes, Justice Sawant was one of the three judges of an independent panel that probed the post-Godhra violence in Gujarat in 2002. On December 31, 2017, Justice Sawant along with his colleague Justice BG Kolse-Patil co-convened the Elgar Parishad  which culminated into a major socio-political churning.