“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show,” is how Charles Dickens begins his semi-autobiographical novel David Copperfield.
Dhananjaya Yeshwant Chandrachud, who recently retired as the Chief Justice of India (CJI), could not entertain any such doubt and would want to play the hero not only of his own life but in the lives of several others as well. Dhananjaya was not even 2 years old when his father, Yeshwant, was appointed as a young judge of the Bombay High Court at the instance of Justice P.B. Gajendragadkar. Gajendragadkar knew the family well from the times of Yeshwant’s father, the advocate Vishnu Chandrachud.
Early years
D.Y. Chandrachud would have been barely 13 when the family moved to New Delhi, consequent to Y.V. Chandrachud’s elevation to the Supreme Court in 1972. Barely a year later, in April 1973, Y.V. Chandrachud sided with the government on the 6:7 verdict in the landmark Kesavananda Bharati case. Some scholars believe that his vote on the majority side was switched upon the advice of his mentor Justice Gajendragadkar. Worse was to come in 1976 when in the ADM Jabalpur case, Justices Y.V. Chandrachud and P.N. Bhagwati ruled that the right to life itself could be suspended during an Emergency. Justice Hans Raj Khanna, who wrote the sole dissent, found himself superseded for the Chief Justice’s job but was immortalised in legal history.
After the Emergency, Justice Y.V. Chandrachud went on to serve for over seven years as Chief Justice, but he never could live down the infamy of having buckled under pressure. Sometime after his retirement, he even made a public speech apologising for the ADM judgment. Dhananjaya was probably aware that his father’s legacy was perceived as a mixed bag wherein industry and erudition paled against a record of not standing up when it mattered.
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It is against this backdrop that one must look at the hero of this article growing up in Delhi as a schoolboy from St. Columba’s, a college student in St. Stephen’s, a law undergraduate at Delhi University, and a postgraduate at Harvard on an Inlaks scholarship followed by a doctorate from the same university. He could have easily morphed into a global citizen as many of his compatriots did, but he returned to India.
After a short period of practice in New Delhi alongside his father-in-law, Y.S. Chitale, who was a renowned Senior Advocate, he returned to Mumbai (then Bombay) in the late 1980s to practise at the High Court. He also taught postgraduate law students in an LLM course at Bombay University, where the author was among his pupils. His lectures were a blend of scholarship and industry, making constitutional interpretation both intellectually rigorous and accessible. With his insider perspective and academic flair polished at one of the best law schools, he quickly earned a reputation for excellence. It was clear he was destined for greatness. Soon, he was designated as a Senior Advocate and thereafter appointed as Additional Solicitor General before becoming a judge at the Bombay High Court. Throughout this stint, the accumulated goodwill and influence of his father’s long career played a key role in the timely career breaks that came his way.
He never shied away from the extreme hard work that is demanded of judges, and his academic aptitude allowed him to dissect issues and elucidate them in a manner that had not hitherto been seen in judgments. Chapterised headings, fully indexed footnotes, chronologically traced citations—all made for judicial writing of a very high order. In court, he was calm, courteous, and never made the counsel feel intimidated by his erudition. He kept an open mind and showed willingness to be persuaded against his initial instinct. He did not suffer fools gladly but generally did not shut them down with a temper tantrum. It was not surprising that some Maharashtrian lawyers nicknamed him “Godbole” (sweet talker).
His judgment in the Vodafone retrospective taxation case brought him a lot of attention in the commercial world. At an interview for an Inlaks scholarship, a woman candidate who did not recognise the boyish-looking interviewer criticised the judgment on several points of law. To his credit, Chandrachud took up the woman’s case for scholarship because those were the very points that had troubled him as a judge while delivering the judgment.
The infamous episode when Prime Minister Modi performed Ganesh puja in Chandrachud’s home, on September 11. | Photo Credit: PTI
In 2013 he was sent as Chief Justice of the Allahabad High Court, the largest in the country (in terms of sanctioned strength of judges) and a traditional gateway for a judge marked for elevation to the Supreme Court. As he presided over its 150th anniversary in 2016, he took great care to demarcate the wall of separation between the executive and the judiciary. His stint there gave him an inside view into the caste dynamics of the Indo-Gangetic plain.
Entry to the Supreme Court
May 13, 2016, saw him being sworn in as a judge of the Supreme Court as part of that elite class of judges who know on the day of taking oath that barring a mishap, they will one day be sworn in as the Chief Justice of India. His dissenting views in the Aadhaar and Bhima Koregaon cases, his concurrences in the Sabarimala, Puttaswamy, and Navtej Singh Johar cases—all spoke of a constitutional vision centred on individual autonomy and dignity. His judgment, now overruled in B.K. Pavitra, also saw him push back against the whittling down of constitutional reservations. He opened many doors to women in the armed forces, and the sight of women officers accompanying nuclear-capable missiles down Rajpath on Republic Day would not have been possible without his activist intervention.
He also opened the Supreme Court and the judiciary to greater public involvement by allowing access to webcasting of judicial proceedings. It is not uncommon now to run into ordinary Indians who have taken to watching interesting court proceedings throughout the country. During hearings on the hollowing out of Article 370, live feed from the Supreme Court site was rebroadcast on local Kashmiri channels and went a long way towards explaining constitutional nuances to a wider audience.
In management of personnel, he was not as successful. While he has populated the High Courts with some good choices, he has not always fought for and ensured the appointment of the best. His inability to enforce the recommendations of the collegium meant that the government got a pocket-veto on implementation. The institution suffered a diminution of its authority, which seems unlikely to be reversed. He also had a very keen sense of who was his man and who was not. In his two-year tenure as CJI, he managed to designate over a hundred advocates as Senior Advocates, thus democratising the senior Bar and diluting its exclusivity.
His reticence in confronting and confining executive power to its correct constitutional limits was best exemplified by the video spectacle of him and the Prime Minister doing a Ganesh puja together at the Chief Justice’s house during court hours. It sent forth a powerful message: In the current regime, no institutional citadel remained unbreached and that a de-facto Hindu Rashtra did not need a committed judiciary. A merely complicit one would suffice.
When the puja is seen in conjunction with Chandrachud’s handling of the Ayodhya and Varanasi cases, the pattern that emerges is of complicity in a constitutional philosophy aligned to a majoritarian religious reading of its provisions. In this legalverse, the constitutional compact among citizens and government is not a balancing of competing collective interests but an enumeration of weak individual rights, indulged in only at the sufferance of the majority. In other words, the Constitution is not a fetter on majoritarian impulses but a mere reflection of its best face.
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The unanimous Ayodhya judgment that he anonymously authored is a careful balancing act as it justified an unjustified takeover of a minority place of worship for the establishment of a temple for the majority. The judgment refutes the claim that a temple was brought down to build a mosque in medieval India. It awards decrees to both religions as having established their rights of worship at the spot, yet it imposes majoritarian peace by pushing away the mosque to an alternative site. Chandrachud and the other members of the bench may have well claimed that the judgment had pushed the genie of communal majoritarianism back into its bottle.
However, the public messaging of triumphant majoritarianism saw the genie resurface with fresh claims on sites in Varanasi and Mathura. Three of the members of the Ayodhya bench found convenient post-retirement sinecures. It was Chandrachud who, instead of shutting down fresh claims, stoked the fires in the Varanasi case by suggesting from the bench an argument that was not even made by the counsel for the parties. He said that while the character of a religious site on August 15, 1947, had to be preserved, courts could not be precluded from an inquiry into what the exact character was. Thus, the constitutional bargain on Ayodhya that Parliament made and the Constitution Bench endorsed was undone by what can only charitably be called an unguarded comment. If India were to relive the rath yatra and the riots that accompanied Ayodhya, Chandrachud’s comment would rank with Rajiv Gandhi’s opening of the locks to the Babri mosque.
As he walks into the judicial sunset, he retires as a yugapurush (man of the age) embodying all the vices and virtues of the age. He has shown us that Indian judges are capable of much research, erudition, and industry. However, he has not shown us that they can stand up when it matters. Like the legendary cricketer Sachin Tendulkar, he was technically proficient, nurtured from a very young age and dominant in his day. Like Tendulkar, his record as captain is at best mixed and unworthy of the early promise that was displayed. If he had been Chief Justice during the leadership of a Narasimha Rao or a Manmohan Singh, he might have stood out as an all-time great. But current times required a bloody-mindedness that he simply did not possess. He was a Sachin Tendulkar when the times demanded a Vinesh Phogat.
Sanjay Hegde is a Senior Advocate designated by the Supreme Court of India.
