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Saurav Das

@SauravDassss

May 20

#StoryAlert🚨

Rahul Gandhi’s dissent over the CBI Director selection has reopened a larger constitutional question: if the process stays opaque and extensions keep favouring the Executive, what exactly is the CJI there to guarantee?

The Chief Justice of India’s seat in the Prime Minister-led three member committee to select a CBI Director produces neither neutrality, nor transparency, nor accountability. So what purpose does it then serve?

It merely produces a halo to a process that @RahulGandhi now describes as “biased”. If Gandhi’s account in his dissent note is accurate, and that indeed the procedure currently only favours a “pre-decided candidate”, then how does it reflect on Chief Justice of India Surya Kant?

The larger issue I address in this special column for @frontline_india is that it is not publicly known whether the Chief Justice himself received the full records of persons he was going to vote for.

If the Leader of the Opposition was kept in the dark, the judge may well have been kept there beside him. In this column, I write about what happened after I attempted to intervene through the RTI Act to uncover the truth behind the CJI’s participation.

Link to the story: frontline.thehindu.com/columns/cbi-di…

In May 2023, this author had filed a RTI application addressed to the Supreme Court of India on the role of its Chief Justice in the appointment of the CBI Director. The application sought answers on a few pointed questions:

1. when did the CJI’s Office receive the list of eligible officers being considered for the post,
2. whether service records, integrity records, personal details, and other relevant material were received.
3. And more importantly, what criteria did the Chief Justice’s side apply for shortlisting names and what inputs, if any, did the Chief Justice provide during the Committee’s meeting.

This was the same month when the selection process was on which ultimately led to current Director Praveen Sood’s appointment.

In reply, the Public Information Officer (PIO) of the Supreme Court rejected the RTI citing three sections of the RTI Act, two of which were exemptions from disclosure.

First, section 8(1)(e) which exempts disclosure of information held in a fiduciary relationship.

Second, section 8(1)(j) which relates to personal information which has no connection to public activity or public interest.

And third, section 11(1) which is actually just a procedure to be followed if information concerning third parties are to be disclosed. It is not a free-standing exemption clause.

As is routine with the Supreme Court’s RTI responses, the rejection was not justified. It is a settled principle of law that the PIO ought to justify why a particular exemption clause has been invoked and how it applies in the facts of the case.

Read 8 tweets

Saurav Das

@SauravDassss

Aug 27, 2025

#StoryAlert 🚨

If the nation’s highest judicial chair is surrendered to a candidate of gravely doubtful integrity, Chief Justice B.R. Gavai’s name will be etched as the man who bartered it away.

Will he now hold any moral authority to invoke the ideals of Babasaheb Ambedkar in his many lectures? To preside over compromise of possibly the highest evil while preaching constitutional fidelity would be nothing short of desecration.

My piece, for the @frontline_india. A 🧵.

Link—frontline.thehindu.com/columns/suprem…

The government was very keen on elevating Justice Vipul M. Pancholi to the Supreme Court in May 2025. However, Justice Nagarathna and with Justice Vikram Nath opposed. Justice Nagarathna stood her ground and blocked the proposal.

The government relented only when she, and the rest of the Collegium, agreed to Karnataka High Court Chief Justice N.V. Anjaria’s elevation to the Supreme Court. Anjaria’s parent High Court is also Gujarat.

Justice Nagarathna was apparently assured that a compromise on Anjaria meant that Pancholi’s candidature would be shelved.

However, to her utter surprise, Chief Justice Pancholi’s name surfaced again, mere three months later, and the other Collegium members—Chief Justice Gavai, and Justices Surya Kant, Nath, and J.K. Maheshwari—voted in his favour.

Read 12 tweets

Saurav Das

@SauravDassss

Aug 24, 2025

#StoryAlert 🚨

Surendra Gadling’s bail application has become a Kafkaesque file in the Supreme Court. It appears on the cause list, only to vanish. It is mentioned, only to be deferred. It is scheduled, only to be adjourned. The judge presiding over it, Justice M.M. Sundresh, has turned the very act of not hearing into a form of adjudication. A 🧵.

My tenth 'Case In Point' column for the @frontline_india—frontline.thehindu.com/columns/suprem…

Gadling, a human rights activist, has been in jail under UAPA charges in the Bhima Koregaon case for over seven years now. His bail in another case of arson from 2016 was rejected by the Bombay High Court in February 2023. His appeal has since been pending in the Supreme Court, without a hearing.

The bail plea has been listed 17 times since it was first filed in August 2023.

Of them, 13 times before Justice Sundresh’s bench.

Four times, the matter was not listed despite a promise to list.

When liberty itself is at stake, such judicial lethargy begins to look less like a usual delay and more like a deliberate design.

Read 14 tweets

Saurav Das

@SauravDassss

Aug 6, 2025

#StoryAlert 🚨

Once again, a Chief Justice of India finds himself in the throes of a propriety crisis. An important case has somehow made its way before Chief Justice Gavai’s bench, in violation of Supreme Court’s own rules and convention.

Chief Justice Gavai must face an uncomfortable question: Is he any better than his predecessors?

A thread. 🧵

Link—frontline.thehindu.com/columns/cji-b-…

1/16

The controversy stems from the aftermath of a remarkable May 2025 judgment known as the Vanashakti case, delivered by a Bench headed by Justice Abhay Oka, consisting Justice Ujjal Bhuyan.

In short, the judgment struck down as “illegal” a 2017 and 2021 procedure systemised by the Environment Ministry for ex-post facto environmental clearance. Any company that failed to get env clearance *prior* to starting the project could do so under the regime after paying a penalty.

2/16

The judgment held this system—which legalised the corporates’ sins later by obtaining clearance post hoc—to be illegal. Remarkably, it also restrained the Union Government from coming up with a similar system in future. Justice Oka retired shortly after this judgment.

3/16

Read 17 tweets

Saurav Das

@SauravDassss

Feb 28, 2025

#StoryAlert 🚨

The many analyses explaining the Aam Aadmi Party’s poll debacle in Delhi are missing one important player – the Supreme Court. While it dilly-dallied on fixing the grave constitutional crisis, governance suffered. A thread.

thewire.in/law/supreme-co…

It’s not that AAP has never delivered on its promises; Delhi’s health and education landscape saw great changes. But, beginning 2015, bit by bit, the elected government’s powers to govern had been taken away by the Union government, and the judiciary allowed this to happen.

It began in May 2015, with a circular that took away the newly elected @ArvindKejriwal government. What followed was a contentious battle in court. Several hurdles were posed by the bureaucrats. Read more about this in the piece.

Read 15 tweets

Saurav Das

@SauravDassss

Feb 19, 2025

#MyPiece🚨

It is rather rich of the Supreme Court to preach morality when, not too long ago, not a single Supreme Court judge publicly objected to their Chief Justice presiding over cases despite serious allegations of sexual harassment. 1/10

thewire.in/law/supreme-co…

The condition imposed on @BeerBicepsGuy and "his associates" to not air "any shows " for the time being until further orders is a sweeping condition.

One would expect the highest court to explain why it deemed it necessary to bar someone from their profession and gag their future speech-both fundamental rights. 2/10

Yet, the Supreme Court imposed this condition arbitrarily – paternalistic, sweeping, and entirely unaccountable – emblematic of its mai-baap approach, wherein it sees itself as the ultimate arbiter of all things, unburdened by the need to justify its own excesses. 3/10

Read 11 tweets

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