The formidable legacy of CJI Dipak Misra

When he retires on October 2, after 13 months as Chief Justice of India, Dipak Misra will have secured his legacy as a judge who advanced individual liberty and gender equality, thanks in no small measure to a string of progressive verdicts that came in the last few weeks of his tenure.He will probably also depart with a sense of amusement, if he pauses to consider all that was assumed and said about him during his tenure, which witnessed extraordinary scenes in the land’s highest court, and his last-minute anointment as an unlikely guardian of the liberal moral order.In the end, his commitment to upholding the supremacy of constitutional values and his refusal to flinch before the weight of societal morality and age-old customs, is what will likely be remembered about him.His order mandating the playing of national anthem at the start of movies in cinema halls was widely panned. So much so that when he became CJI, the media widely referred to him as the judge who delivered the national anthem verdict.His critics were quick to assume that he identified with the aggressive and exclusionary brand of nationalism that was ascendant. But the reality was that the government pushed the case hard in court and a personal fascination with the flag dating back to college days probably helped the cause.A whiff of youthful idealism was evident to observers in another case involving a poet who was charged with obscenity for a satirical poem on Gandhi. He had written about the difference between the Gandhi then and the Gandhi in us now, which allows us to rape orphans, to sell women on the streets. The language, lamenting the gap between what we are and what we would be if we discovered the Gandhi in us, was raw and gritty.How can you criticise Gandhi, CJI Misra demanded to know. The line between what was obscene and what wasn’t, he suggested, was Gandhi. Not just Gandhi, all such national icons, in fact. He exonerated the hapless poet.Many lawyers didn’t fully comprehend the judicial logic in that verdict. In the controversial Hadiya case, where the parents of a Hindu girl approached the court against her daughter’s conversion and marriage to a Muslim, CJI Misra came under attack by the liberals.He did what was expected of a custodian of the Constitution, and upheld the right of an adult woman to romance and marry whoever she chose to.When four of his senior colleagues broke the unspoken code of silence surrounding judicial proceedings in chambers, he held a stoic silence.Even at the height of that crisis, he would only tell journalists: “Do the right thing.” He was a workaholic, but every time he hit a rough patch, he seemed to just get on by working harder.He went about warding off all challenges to his authority in a calm and clinical manner — either heading a bench or convening larger benches he trusted to solve the problem.The unfortunate events triggered by the unusual press conference by the Supreme Court judges and the rush to deal with the contentious Ayodhya case culminated in the Opposition Congress bringing in an impeachment motion against him. The motion did not take off but hit his image hard.He now had the dubious distinction of being the only CJI against whom an impeachment motion was initiated while in office. To be fair to him, CJI Misra did not list the case for hearing. It came to him as a burdensome inheritance from his predecessor JS Khehar. “So many years have passed,” he said. It has to be heard at some point of time, he said, when the formidable senior advocate Rajeev Dhavan accused him of showing undue haste in hearing the case.In the aftermath, he showed no rancour to those behind the impeachment. Not the lawyers, nor the liberals. He made it a point to hear activist lawyer Prashant Bhushan who led the attack on him over the alleged medical scam more patiently than ever.In his closing days, he threw Bhushan off with a disarming remark: “Mr Bhushan always espouses the cause of the poor.” He used literature and the shastras to mollify Dhavan.When a meddlesome lawyer reminded him of CJI-designate Ranjan Gogoi’s role in the press conference to object to his elevation, he only got an enigmatic: “The calm of the Pacific is pleasing.” Liberal though he was in his outlook, he was wary of straying too far off the course from the penal statute book. Accusations of going soft on the government flew fast and thick.This month he left all that behind, cementing a lasting legacy when he invoked constitutional morality to urge the world to take the much harassed LGBT community as they are: to treat them with dignity, to not treat them as criminals.To open the doors of Sabarimala temple to all women and to cease the treatment of women as the property of man in a Victorian adultery law.In a matter of days CJI Misra has narrowed the gap between aspirations and reality for millions, held out hope for a bitter, cynical people and in the process, added to his stature. In the historic verdict decriminalising sex between men, he wrote: “I am what I am. So take me as I am.”

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