/ LAW
RANJAN GOGOI seems to believe he has been wronged. In his recently published autobiography, Gogoi appears as keen to sound humble as he does to portray himself as a victim. There is a sense of absurdity in a former chief justice of India, who accepted a nomination to the Rajya Sabha from the ruling party just months after completing a term with many verdicts gifted to the government, claiming to be a victim. Yet, Gogoi has persisted, undeterred. More than anything else, Gogoi’s autobiography reads like the desperate attempt of a disgraced judge to set the record straight on the many controversies that plagued his career.
Gogoi does not try to disguise this endeavour. The title of the autobiography is an open admission of how he feels he has been misremembered. He recalls the “devastation caused” by the sexual-harassment allegations against him by a former staffer of the Supreme Court. Gogoi adds that the media and legal world have constantly brought up the issue, and that this “continues even today.” He writes, “This is why I have been prodded to title my memoirs Justice for the Judge.”
But that is hardly the only record that Gogoi wants to set straight. The former CJI uses the book to address all the controversies that may have cast a cloud over his reputation. These include his supersession of the judge Amitava Roy to the Guwahati High Court bench; his recommendations as part of the Supreme Court collegium; the adjudication of the National Register of Citizens case; the verdict in the Rafale, Kashmir and Ayodhya cases; and much more.
In the prologue, he writes, “Ayodhya, Rafale and electoral bonds, among others, are the frequently mentioned cases in which the judicial verdict is alleged to have been consciously rendered to favour the government in power. This book candidly lays forth my inability to comprehend the basis for such perceptions.” Pertinently, apart from this brief mention of electoral bonds, at no point does Gogoi address why he did not decide on the matter for over a year after it came before the court, or even stay the controversial scheme that allows limitless, anonymous corporate donations to political parties.
The book is marked by a convenient omission of facts, and includes memories cherry-picked to present Gogoi as the humble victim of an unjust system and an unfair media, except when he claims to be the rightful beneficiary of credit due to him. For instance, Gogoi acknowledges that, in 1999, he was recommended for elevation to the Guwahati bench together with Amitava Roy, his childhood friend in Dibrugarh and then colleague at the same law office. He notes that, at the time, Ram Jethmalani was the union law minister, under the government of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Atal Bihari Vajpayee. He admits that his and Roy’s names were recommended again in 2000, after the BJP leader Arun Jaitley was appointed law minister. Gogoi writes that the Supreme Court collegium, gatekeeper to all appointments in the higher judiciary, took the decision to supersede Roy based on a recommendation by a judge from Assam who proposed elevating Gogoi “keeping in view my exposure to all-round work, practice and income.”
Gogoi uses the incident to justify the opacity of collegium proceedings. “What would have been the extent of embarrassment for the late Justice S.N. Phukan”, a respected judge from Assam, if the proceedings of the 2001 Collegium meeting wherein my name was recommended by him in preference to Justice Amitava Roy (whose name appeared higher in the list of recommendees) had been made public?” Gogoi writes. “He would have certainly come
