Lafleur 🜃🍁

#StoryAlert🚨 BR Gavai: A Chief Justice without a north star Chief Justice Bhushan Ramkrishna Gavai, who retired on November 23, joins a recent streak of disappointing Chief Justices of India. Chief Justice Gavai did little on matters central to constitutional governance: enforcing his own Court’s orders, hearing bail pleas in politically sensitive cases, and resisting executive encroachment into judicial reasoning and administration. For an institution criticised for elitism and opacity, Gavai’s rise was symbolically significant, but what about the substantive legacy? He speaks the language of due process against bulldozer justice, fortifies procedural safeguards on arrest, strikes down portions of the Tribunal Reforms Act in the name of judicial independence—and then brazens through Justice Vipul Pancholi’s seriously questionable elevation, recalls a stellar environmental judgment, and dilutes the only meaningful check on gubernatorial obstruction. The only plausible answer is that Chief Justice Gavai was not a judge anchored in principle. He practised situational opportunism, marked by constitutional rhetoric but quiet abdication when it mattered. I critically analyse Gavai’s judgeship in this 18th 'Case In Point' column for @frontline_india: frontline.thehindu.com/news/… Subscribe to independent journalism! Support independent journalists. {The End}