Justice Arun Mishra retired on Wednesday, bringing to a close a much-talked about tenure in the Supreme Court. Serving for over six years as a judge in the apex court, his tenure has seen many controversies, and not just through his judgments but also outside court.
Why his judgments always managed to grab headlines can be narrowed down to two reasons — Justice Mishra minced no words and secondly, several politically sensitive and high-profile cases as well as most of the important cases in the past five years have been listed before him.
Justice Mishra, who was elevated to the Supreme Court on July 7, 2014, has heard around 97,000 cases as a judge of high courts of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Calcutta, as per the Supreme Court website.
Justice Mishra delivered several verdicts and orders on issues ranging from the environment to the interests of hassled home buyers and issues related to the telecom sector, but his tenure would also be remembered for the controversies surrounding him.
Here are some of the recent controversies surrounding the judge that grabbed eyeballs:
Over two years ago, four Supreme Court judges openly addressed the media, an event that had never happened before. They alleged that cases in which members of the ruling party were implicated were being partially listed to certain benches. The trigger for the press conference was believed to be the allocation of a plea seeking an independent probe into the death of special CBI judge BH Loya before a bench headed by Justice Mishra. While Justice Mishra’s name was not mentioned explicitly, Justice Ranjan Gogoi, who was one of the four judges, when asked whether the listing of the Judge Loya case before a ‘junior’ judge was the issue that triggered the briefing, replied with a ‘yes.’ Justice Mishra later recused himself from the case.
In January 2017, Justice Mishra, as part of a two-judge bench, dismissed a plea seeking setting up of a special investigation team (SIT) to probe bribery allegations against Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the basis of documents seized during raids on the Sahara and Birla groups.
The bench, headed by Justice Mishra, said it cannot order an investigation or an FIR based on “inadmissible materials that do not have any evidentiary value under the law”, more so against the high constitutional functionaries whose names are mentioned in the documents, which have been held as prima facie “fabricated” by the Income Tax Settlement Commission.
The bench of Justices Arun Mishra and Amitava Roy had also said that “courts have to be on guard” while dealing with matters demanding probe against high functionaries, as the case in hand was devoid of any “cogent” material or “independent evidence corroborating materials” to order an investigation.
Last year, farmer associations had written to then Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi opposing the fact that Justice Mishra was on the Constitution bench formed to review a verdict delivered by a bench that Justice Mishra himself was on. The Constitution bench was formed to review two judgments — one from 2014 and one from 2018 — that were contrasting. The association said that Justice Mishra had already expressed his view on the 2014 judgment.
The 2014 judgment had said that in matters of land acquisition, depositing compensation in the government treasury cannot be regarded as payment made to the landowner and if the landowner refuses to take the compensation, the amount can be deposited in the court. The 2018 judgment said that depositing the money to the government would be enough for land acquisition, even if the payment had not reached the landowner. However, Justice Mishra did not recuse himself from the case and upheld the 2018 judgment.
When allegations of sexual harassment were levelled by a Supreme Court staffer against the then Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi, a bench with Justice Mishra had been formed to look into the ‘larger conspiracy’ against the judiciary, which was allegedly behind the staffer’s complaint. Justice Patnaik was asked to file a report on the allegations levelled by advocate Utsav Bains. A three-member In-House Inquiry Committee of the apex court found “no substance” in the allegations of sexual harassment levelled against Justice Gogoi. A year on, Justice Gogoi is now a Rajya Sabha member, the Supreme Court staffer who was sacked from her job has been reinstated, and although a report has been filed by Justice Patnaik on the allegations, it has not been taken further.
Justice Mishra’s address during the inaugural function of the International Judicial Conference 2020 on ‘Judiciary and the Changing World’ at the Supreme Court, in which he had praised Modi, had come under criticism from some sections of the bar, as he was a sitting judge praising a member of the Executive. During his address, Justice Mishra had termed Modi as an “internationally acclaimed visionary” and a “versatile genius, who thinks globally and acts locally.”
In 2019, senior advocate Dushyant Dave wrote a letter to the then Chief Justice of India alleging that cases that could affect the Adani Group were increasingly being listed before one particular bench, that of Justice Mishra, which was a violation of the procedure. Dave had alleged that even though there was no special urgency in the case, two cases pertaining to the Adani Group had been ‘hastily heard and disposed of’ by the vacation bench in 2019, which did not heed to adjournment pleas.
“I’m told that the total benefit to this Corporate Client from these two judgments will run into thousands of crores,” Dave had said in the letter. However, there was no response from the Supreme Court on the letter.
The Supreme Court in July this year initiated suo motu criminal contempt proceedings against lawyer Prashant Bhushan for two of his tweets in June, one of which was about the photograph of Chief Justice SA Bobde sitting on a Harley-Davidson motorbike in Nagpur. The case was heard amid the COVID-19 pandemic, when many more urgent cases were left pending in court, and the bench headed by Justice Mishra held Bhushan guilty of contempt of court. Bhushan said he will not apologise for his tweets, adding that it would go against his conscience. The Attorney General had also asked the court not to sentence him, however, the Supreme Court sentenced Bhushan to a token fine of Re 1 for his tweets.
A day before his retirement, a Supreme Court bench headed by Justice Mishra delivered an important judgment giving 10 years to telecom firms to pay over Rs 93,000 crore of Adjusted Gross Revenue (AGR) related dues to the government. The last verdict he delivered was the removal of 48,000 slum dwellings along the 140 km length of railway tracks in Delhi within three months. The bench added that there shall not be any kind of political interference in the execution of the plan and also restrained any court from granting any kind of stay with respect to the removal of encroachments in the area.