Raising eyebrows, former Chief Justice of India (CJI) Ranjan Gogoi, who was accused of sexually harassing a colleague, was nominated as the member of the Rajya Sabha on Monday by the Ministry of Home Affairs. Gogoi was crucial in implementing the National Register of Citizens in Assam.
Gogoi had retired from the Supreme Court in November last year. Before being elevated as the CJI of the Supreme Court, Gogoi had worked as the Chief Justice of Punjab and Haryana.
In April 2019, just months before he retired, a woman who was a junior court assistant working in the Supreme Court accused Gogoi of sexually harassing her with unwelcome advances since October 2018. She alleged that the ex-CJI threatened her with consequences of terminating her and jailing her under false cases, if she resisted his advances. She was then transferred and allegedly falsely accused in a bribery case, for not giving in. Her husband, a constable in Delhi police was also transferred and harrased, she had claimed.
Subsequently she wrote to 22 Supreme Court judges for initiating an inquiry against the then-CJI, and immediately, an in-house special panel of judges with present CJI SA Bobde, NV Ramana and Indira Banerjee was constituted to probe the allegations against Gogoi.
Shortly after, she pulled out of the inquiry claiming that they did not allow her to have a lawyer nor did they inform her of the procedure that would follow.
The panel subsequently in May 2019, gave a clean chit to Gogoi, as they “found no substance” in the woman’s allegations.
Earlier in January 2020, it was reported that the woman was then reinstated at work. However, she took a leave.
Denying the allegations against him, Gogoi had reportedly said, “I don't want to stoop so low as to answer these charges,” and claimed that “bigger forces” were behind these allegations, which were “trying to destabilise the judiciary”.
Gogoi began his judicial service as a judge of Guwahati court in 2001. In his career, Gogoi has been a part of several important as well as controversial judgments. Most recently, he headed the bench that gave the verdict in the Ayodhya land dispute case, where the land was awarded for the building of a Ram temple by the Supreme Court.
Ranjan Gogoi was also one of the four judges who held an unprecedented press conference in January of 2018, where they expressed their concerns over the ‘independence of the judiciary’ under the then-Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra.