Abhinav Chandrachud - Supreme Whispers: Supreme Court Judges, 1980-90

I n the cold Delhi winter of January 1980, a young American scholar met five judges of the Supreme Court of India. His name was George H. Gadbois, Jr. He had come to India with a reputation as a serious scholar who had written about the Indian judiciary in well-known journals like the Law and Society Review and Economic and Political Weekly. The judges he met gave him astonishing details: about what they actually thought of their colleagues, about the inner workings and politics of the court, their interactions with the government, and the judicial appointments process, among many other things. This was only the beginning. Over the course of that decade, Gadbois came to India on two more occasions and conducted over Each interview yielded a fascinating glimpse into the secluded world of the judges of the Supreme Court.

For instance, the wife of a Supreme Court judge, S.C. Roy, informed Gadbois that after her husband was appointed to the Supreme Court, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi asked him to take care of some legal work concerning her family property in Allahabad. When that judge died in office shortly after being appointed, some people These and scores of other stories, discussed in this book, would have been lost to history had it not been for Gadboiss interviews.

Gadbois prepared for each interview by reading everything that he could lay his hands on about the judge. As we shall soon see, this yielded rich dividends, because the judges were incredibly frank and forthright in the answers they gave him. For instance, Gadbois learnt that in the 1980s, though Chief Justice Y.V. Chandrachud wanted to appoint M.N. Chandurkar, chief justice of the Madras High Court, to the Supreme Court, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi decided to reject that appointment merely because Chandurkar had attended the funeral of (and eulogized) an RSS leader, M.S. Golwalkar, who had been a friend of Chandurkars father.

Each interview lasted anywhere between forty-five minutes and several hours. Though they began in 1980, most interviews were conducted between April to July 1983 and March to December 1988. During each meeting, Gadbois diligently took down handwritten notes, which he later typed up on his typewriter. He recorded nearly every detail of what the judge had told him, sometimes to a fault. For instance, Gadbois wrote that Justice S. Natarajan, a hospitable fellow, had served him a pureed watermelon drink.

These typewritten interview notes now survive Gadbois who passed away of a terminal disease at the age of eighty in February 2017. They provide an invaluable insight into a decade of politics, decision-making and legal culture in the Supreme Court of India. Gadbois sent me his notes shortly before he passed away, without imposing any condition on how I could use them.

Some of the contents of the interviews were off the record and most have never been written about, not even in the monumental book

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After graduating from high school, Gadbois served as a sergeant in the US army for three years, between 1953 and 1956. After going back to the US, he got a teaching job in the department of political science at the University of Kentucky, which he held for the rest of his career.

Gadbois made his second trip to India between 1969 and 1970, once again on a fellowship from the American Institute. It was in these two years that Gadbois first took a serious interest in the judges of the Supreme Court. Though he did not substantially Gadbois carefully studied 3272 reported judgments delivered by the Supreme Court between 1950 and 1967, and tried to work out the voting pattern of the judges, classifying them as Modern Liberals, Modern Conservatives, Classical Liberals or Classical Conservatives. In this paper, Gadbois also studied the dissenting patterns of Supreme Court judges. He discovered a pattern which many subsequently found very interesting: As a puisne judge of the Supreme Court (a puisne judge is any judge apart from the chief justice), Justice K. Subba Rao had dissented forty-eight times during his nine-year term in the court, making him the greatest dissenter in the history of the Supreme Court until then, but as the chief justice of India, Subba Rao had not dissented even once. This suggested that the chief justice of India had a critical role in determining the outcome of cases decided by the court, by selecting the judges who would sit with him on the bench.

Both these articles were read by several judges of the Supreme Court. The interviews were conducted in interesting political times. The Emergency had come to an end. The Janata government had been voted in and out of power. Indira Gandhi was back in the government and the independence of the judiciary was under attack, which continued under her son, Rajiv.

Many judges thought very highly of Gadbois, which is why they agreed to meet him in the first place. Justice A.P. Sen informed Gadbois that during the hearings of the Waman Rao case which sought to introduce a National Judicial Appointments Commission for appointing judges.

It was on account of his academic credentials and good reputation with the Supreme Courts judges that Gadbois succeeded in interviewing nearly every judge of the court. An interesting story illustrates this. Justice V.D. Tulzapurkar, in a short meeting with Gadbois in his chamber, refused to be interviewed by him and told him to go away. At the time, Tulzapurkar was very weary of scholars, because he had been heavily criticized by Upendra Baxi, doyen of Indian legal academia, for some of the speeches he had made about the court. Baxi had called Tulzapurkar the chief public flagellator of the Supreme Court, and said that he was knowingly hastening [the courts] disintegration.

Indeed, many of the interviewed judges were very aware of the writings of two prominent legal scholars at that time, H.M. Seervai (former advocate general of Maharashtra, and author of the magnum opus, Constitutional Law of India), and Upendra Baxi. Judges like Justice A.N. Grover, Krishna Iyer, P.S. Kailasam, Tulzapurkar, and A.P. Sen urged Gadbois to read what Seervai had written about them, their own decisions, or others decisions. Similarly, when Gadbois mentioned to Justice D.P. Madon that Baxi had criticized him in a journal called Mainstream, Madon promptly told Gadbois that the title of the article was The Horse and the Rider, indicating that he was familiar with it. Interestingly, therefore, the judges were not completely aloof from the world of academic writing.