When it comes to political interference, former Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi says he had a “dream run” as a Supreme Court judge. But there were a few exceptions. One of those occurred while he was an SC judge hearing the National Register of Citizens (NRC) case, when a senior bureaucrat visited him at his home, asking him to go slow on the issue.
“I don’t remember exactly, but he had come to my residence in January. So I must have been obviously number 2 or number 3 judge, perhaps sometime in 2018 or later part of 2017,” he told CNN-News18 during a conversation over a range of subjects brought to the fore by his recently published memoirs. “I told him why should I do that? I told him I don’t like interference with my judicial work.”
On August 31, 2019, the final list of the much-hyped National Register of Citizens (NRC) for Assam to identify “genuine citizens” was published. It left out around 19 lakh of the total 3.29 crore applicants. The whole exercise was completed in five years at a cost of around Rs 1,600 crore under the supervision of the Supreme Court of India. Alleging the list as defective after it was published, several cases were filed in the SC. The Assam government has taken a stand that this exercise, being “faulty”, will not be accepted and the state is ready to verify anomalies under the top court’s supervision. After the NRC list was first published in Assam, union home minister Amit Shah announced that the Government of India will implement the process across the country.
Asked whether the kind of meddling he faced from the bureaucrat was a commonplace occurrence in his experience, Justice Gogoi disagreed.
“Apart from two interferences, which I mentioned in my book, it was a dream run for me. I functioned as I thought a judge should function,” he said. “I had told them that there is nobody in this country who dares to approach Ranjan Gogoi, to ask him to do something that his conscience will not permit.”
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