Bid to fill vacancies in SC by CJI Lalit-led collegium remains unfinished due to objections by Justice Chandrachud and Justice Nazeer

New Delhi: The bid to fill up the remaining four vacancies of judges in the Supreme Court remained unfinished, as CJI Uday Umesh Lalit-led five-member collegium “discharged” the agenda due to the objections by senior-most judge Justice D Y Chandrachud and Justice S A Nazeer on seeking written consent to the proposal for the appointment.

Justice Lalit, sworn in as the 49th Chief Justice of India on August 27, 2022, will retire on November 8 and has less than a month before he demits office.

Tradition has it that outgoing CJIs leave the issue of appointment of judges through collegium deliberations to the successor the day their remaining tenure in the office comes down to a month.

Besides appointing around 20 judges in different high courts, CJI Lalit-led collegium recently recommended elevation of Chief Justice of the Bombay High Court Justice Dipankar Datta as a judge of the apex court.

It also recommended the elevation of a few high court judges as chief justices (CJs), besides transferring some other CJs and judges.

However, his last ditch effort to recommend the names for filling up the remaining four vacancies in the top court ran into rough weather due to the objections raised by Justices Chandrachud and Nazeer over the method of seeking consent on the names through the circulation method.

The top court currently has 29 judges, including three women judges, against the sanctioned strength of 34.

In an unprecedented development, the Supreme Court Collegium made public the names of the two judges on the panel who objected to the method of "circulation" adopted for eliciting the views of its members on the appointment of judges to the apex court.

In a statement dated October 9 which became public on Monday, the Collegium said Justices DY Chandrachud and S Abdul Nazeer had objected to the method of "circulation" that was used for the first time for eliciting the views of its members who were unable to attend the proceedings physically.

This led to the closure of collegium deliberations on the part of the present CJI. In the meantime, Union Law Minister Kiren Rijiju also wrote a letter to him to nominate his successor who would take over with effect from November 9, 2022.

Justice Chandrachud, the senior-most judge, is widely tipped to be the next Chief Justice of India in accordance with the tradition.

Earlier, the collegium had on September 30 issued statements recommending three high court judges- Justice Jaswant Singh, Justice P B Varale, and Justice Ali Mohammad Magrey- for elevation as chief justices of Orissa, Karnataka, and Jammu and Kashmir high courts respectively.

It also recommended to the Centre the transfer of Chief Justice (CJ) of the Orissa High Court Justice S Muralidhar and Chief Justice of Jammu and Kashmir High Court Justice Pankaj Mithal as CJs of Madras and Rajasthan high courts respectively.

It had also recommended the transfer of three judges of high courts.

Prior to this, the apex court collegium recommended the elevation of Chief Justice of the Bombay High Court Justice Dipankar Datta as a judge of the apex court.

On September 12, the collegium approved the appointment of 20 judges to the high courts of Punjab and Haryana, Bombay, and Karnataka.