NEW DELHI: President Ram Nath Kovind on Tuesday appointed Justice SA Bobde, the senior-most judge in the Supreme Court after CJI Ranjan Gogoi, as the next Chief Justice of India. Bobde will be the 47th CJI. He will hold office till April 23, 2021, following which Justice Sharad Arvind Bobde was sworn in as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of India. He made and subscribed to the oath of office before the President.
Justice Bobde, is the fourth judge from Maharashtra to hold the country's highest judicial post. Earlier, Justice Prahlad Gajendragadkar, the seventh CJI, held office from 1964 to 1966, Justice Mohammad Hidayatullah, the 11th CJI, held office from 1968 to 1970, and Justice Y V Chandrachud, the 16th Chief Justice of India, served from 1978 to 1985.
In the last two years, Justice Bobde has been part of three historical judgments of the Supreme Court. On November 9 this year, he was part on the five-judge constitution bench that delivered a unanimous verdict on the Ayodhya land dispute case.
Justice Bobde was also part of the nine-judge SC bench which had, in August 2017, unanimously held that the Right to Privacy was a constitutionally protected fundamental right in India. He was also part of the three-judge bench that clarified that no Indian citizen should be deprived of basic services and government subsidies because they did not have an Aadhaar card.
In 1996, Justice Bobde had also handled a contempt of court case involving Shiv Sena founder Balasaheb Thackeray. A petition was filed by an individual against Thackeray and fellow Sena leaders Sanjay Raut and Subhash Desai, as well as some newspapers. The petitioner had alleged that at a Dussehra rally at Shivaji Park in Mumbai, Thackeray had made a statement, “which precisely contained that he (Thackeray) was told by someone that a judge demanded Rs 35 lakh for delivering a judgment in his favour”.
