Uneasy gavel of the district judiciary—opacity in dismissal, ‘perpetual fear’ of high courts

Judge Jagat Mohan Chaturvedi, who was dismissed from service in 2015, is a case in point. Madhya Pradesh HC while reinstating him has pointed to the judiciary’s ‘colonial mindset’.

Illustration: Soham Sen | ThePrint

New Delhi: The Madhya Pradesh High Court has ordered the reinstatement of Jagat Mohan Chaturvedi, who was serving in the state’s Special Court for hearing SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act cases before dismissal from service in October 2015 for alleged misconduct and corruption, despite a lack of evidence.

By then, Chaturvedi had served as a judge for nearly 28 years, starting from his appointment as a civil judge in 1987 till the termination of his service in 2015. At the time, in his plea against the allegations, he submitted to the court that in his “blemish-less” career, he had not faced a single punishment related to the discharge of his duties or otherwise.

The chargesheet against him alleged misconduct and corruption in connection with his divergent opinions while hearing students’ applications for anticipatory bail in the Vyapam scam—granting bail to some students while denying bail to others in cases where the facts and circumstances looked similar. The Vyapam scam—unearthed in 2013—pertained to the large-scale irregularities in medical college admissions and government job recruitments in MP.

At the time, Chaturvedi told the court that he had granted anticipatory bail in 2014 to some students in a cheating case as no material evidence was available against them, while dismissing the bail pleas of other students. However, it led to his removal.

Now, to restore the balance of justice a decade later, the Madhya Pradesh High Court admitted the “perpetual fear” of high courts among district judges who function under the HCs, in addition to their concerns over casteism and gender bias, inter-service rivalry, and an opaque process of their removal.

The district judiciary remains plagued by the same problems, despite its key role as the first point of contact for most litigants in India, with an immediate impact on the lives of citizens, and despite a significant funding boost in recent years, according to the HC.

In the colonial era, the district judiciary originated, modelled along the lines of the civil bureaucracy, and the situation today is not very different.

A lack of decisional independence required to deliver decisive justice, along with the bizarre transfer policies and a constant worry about reprisals in the form of disciplinary inquiries by high courts, keep the district judges in a perpetual state of fear, wrote Prashant Reddy, who co-authored the book, Tareekh Pe Justice: Reforms for India’s District Courts, alongside Chitrakshi Jain. Compounded by the opacity of the process of their removal, the fears impact their decision-making. Most district judges stay away from risky or complex cases, and even when they do hear such cases, they avoid decisive orders.

Weighing in on the issue, a judicial officer of the Uttar Pradesh judiciary told ThePrint, “Be it inquiry or the justice dispensation system, evidence must be a vital element; and the life of a common man or a judicial officer cannot be subjected to turmoil.”

Speaking to ThePrint, Prashant Reddy termed the HC’s latest ruling as “a rare instance, where a high court has spoken the plain truth of the brazenly unfair nature of many disciplinary proceedings conducted by high courts against the district judiciary”.

Reddy also said that such unfair and opaque disciplinary proceedings erode the decisional independence of the district judiciary. “If, at all, there is an error in the judgment, an appeals court can correct the error. Judges should not be punished. Disciplinary inquiries deter judges from granting bail, even in deserving cases,” he said.

“If you want district court judges to deliver justice quickly and efficiently, you can not have that kind of orders [that go against them]. Otherwise, it creates a situation of fear psychosis among the lower judiciary, and this is directly linked to the bail problem in India. Courts say bail is the rule, jail is the exception. But the reality is that some of these [district] judges are scared even to do their jobs.”

He also recalled the MP HC’s 2021 ruling in the Zarina Begum vs state of MP case, where Justice Atul Sreedharan—one of the two judges associated with the present case of Chaturvedi—noted at the time that the district judiciary was”extremely tight-fisted when it comes to granting bail”. Judges routinely dismiss bail applications on grounds such as the alleged seriousness of the offence or the pending nature of the investigation. “As a result, high courts suffer a deluge of bail cases, leading to the loss of the court’s precious time in deciding such cases, as opposed to civil or criminal appeals,” Reddy said.

In November 2022, when former Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud delivered an address at his felicitation ceremony organised by the Supreme Court Bar Association, he highlighted the “colonial mindset” in the Indian judiciary. “I think we have fostered a culture of subordination. We call the district judiciary the ‘subordinate judiciary’ … I make a conscious effort not to call district judges the ‘subordinate judges’ because they are not subordinate. They belong to the district judiciary,” Chandrachud stated.

Madhya Pradesh HC’s latest ruling

By way of a 21-page ruling, the high court said in the current order in Chaturvedi’s case that the body language of district judges when they greeted an HC judge “stops short of grovelling before the high court judge, making the judges of the district judiciary the only identifiable species of invertebrate mammals”.

There had been instances of district judges personally attending to HC judges at railway platforms or waiting on them with refreshments, perpetuating a colonial decadence with a sense of entitlement, according to the latest 14 July HC ruling.

“The district judiciary functions under a perpetual fear of the high court,” the Madhya Pradesh High Court noted while directing the reinstatement of Chaturvedi.

Castigating the “dismal relationship” between judges of the high courts and the district judiciary as one between “a feudal lord and a serf”, a bench of Justices Atul Sreedharan and Dinesh Kumar Paliwal set aside a 2015 Madhya Pradesh government-issued notice that terminated Chaturvedi’s service. The then-government notice had only come after a full court decision of the Madhya Pradesh HC to dismiss Chaturvedi.

District court judges, when on deputation to the registry of the high court, were rarely offered a seat by the judges there, the HC said during the latest hearing, adding that when offered a seat, they are hesitant to sit before the HC judges.

Saying that the relationship between the district judiciary and the HCs is not one of mutual respect but, instead, based on a sense of fear and inferiority, the court added, “The subjugation and enslavement of the psyche of the judges of the district judiciary is complete and irreversible, so it seems.”

Further emphasising this passive subjugation, the HC said that the psyche of the district judge gets reflected in their judicial work, ultimately, and they do not grant bail even in the most deserving cases. Giving the prosecution the benefit of doubt, they record convictions in the absence of evidence.

“All this in the name of saving their job, for which the petitioner in this case suffered, for thinking and doing differently,” the court said, taking note of the “gross injustice” meted out to Chaturvedi. It also directed the restoration of his pensionary benefits, adding that “he should be given back wages from the date on which he was terminated, till the date he would have otherwise superannuated with 7% interest”.

Law laid down by SC on district judiciary

Underlining that Chaturvedi with “an otherwise spotless career” had suffered in “unimaginable ways” after his dismissal from service at the age of 58, only two years before his retirement, Chaturvedi’s lawyer pointed out that the Supreme Court had repeatedly depreciated the practice of removing a judge at the end of his career in the Krishna Prasad Verma vs state of Bihar case (2019).

In its 2019 ruling, the Supreme Court heard the case of a Bihar district judge, after his dismissal over two of his bail orders. For instance, in one of these orders, he granted bail to an accused, whose bail the Patna HC had denied. The apex court said that there should be zero tolerance for corruption and judicial misconduct, but also clarified that erroneous orders would not lead to disciplinary action unless there is evidence to show that the judge had extraneous or ulterior motives.

A division or two-judge bench of the top court said at the time that “if a judge of the district judiciary conducts the proceedings in a manner which would reflect on his reputation or integrity and there is prima facie material to show reckless misconduct on his part while discharging such duties, the high court would be entitled to initiate disciplinary action, but such material should be evident from the orders and should also be placed on record during the course of disciplinary proceedings”.

Simply put, without material evidence to substantiate the alleged misconduct, a judge should not go through disciplinary proceedings.

Additionally, the SC held that the correct approach to proceed in such matters would be to record the judge’s errors or his inability to understand the law on his service record on the administrative side in cases where there are no allegations of corruption or extraneous considerations.

However, the Chaturvedi case is not the only incident of a district judge erroneously removed from service, only to be reinstated by a higher court.

Dismissal over a restaurant brawl

In March this year, the Allahabad HC ordered the reinstatement of six probationary judicial officers removed from service in 2014-15, i.e., nearly a decade ago, after they entered into a scuffle with fifteen other judicial officers at a restaurant in Lucknow.

The incident that led to their removal dates back to 2014, when on their last day of training in September that year, the fifteen judicial officers had been dining at the Charan Club and Resort on Lucknow’s Faizabad Road.

During dinner, an altercation ensued between the two parties, and after that, the six trainee judges’ dismissals.

Terming their discharge from service as “clearly stigmatic”, the HC’s three-judge bench hearing the case said that before the move, there should have been an inquiry. Failure to conduct such an inquiry before passing orders of dismissal from service is clearly “arbitrary, unreasonable and therefore violative of not only Article 311(2) but also Article 14 of the Constitution”, said the court.

Article 311 (2) relates to the protection of civil servants against arbitrary dismissal, removal, or reduction in rank, and Article 14 is the fundamental right to equality.

“Since the order of discharge of service of petitioners is punitive in nature, the maxim of audi alteram partem was required to be followed prior to their discharge,” the HC further said, emphasising the importance of the accused judges’ right to be heard.

Stressing that every person has the fundamental right to be protected from arbitrariness under Article 14, the HC said it applies to judges with the same rigour as to ordinary citizens. “Such a fundamental right cannot be denied to judges only on the ground that they hold an exalted post,” it said.

Over a low disposal rate of cases

In December last year, ThePrint reported that a Supreme Court bench of Justices B.V. Nagarathna and N. Kotiswar Singh directed the reinstatement of a woman judicial officer, earlier sacked by the Madhya Pradesh HC over a low disposal rate of cases when she was on probation. The apex court said that the HC had failed to consider her personal health and mental well-being.

Taking into consideration the judicial officer’s health condition, the court said that if women are suffering physically and mentally, “do not say they are slow and send them home”. “Let there be the same criteria for male judges and judicial officers; we will see then, and we know what happens. How can you have target units (of case disposal) for district judiciary?”

Over dereliction of duty, misconduct

In July this year, a division bench of the Gujarat HC directed the reinstatement of a judge, M.J. Indrekar, who, facing a departmental inquiry, was dismissed from service in 2011, accused of neglecting her duty and indulging in misconduct.

Setting aside her order of dismissal from service, the court noted that a “judicial officer cannot be subjected to disciplinary proceedings merely because judgments/orders passed by him/her are wrong”.

Conveying the message given in the present MP HC case, the court said that if HCs are to initiate disciplinary proceedings based on a judicial order, “there should have been strong grounds to suspect the officer’s bona fides, and the order itself should have been actuated by malice, bias or illegality”.

As for the MP HC ruling in Chaturvedi’s case—in a nutshell, it can be surmised by saying that a judge cannot be penalised for passing “wrong orders” without evidence showing such orders were passed due to extraneous reasons, Advocate-on-Record Paras Nath Singh confirmed to ThePrint.

“The high court correctly recognises that district judiciary judges often work under constant fear of high court oversight. In this case, a judge was terminated for granting bail to some while denying it to others. Can this be a valid ground for termination? The High Court rightly ruled it is not,” Singh said. “Ironically, no one whose bail was denied complained against the judge, yet an inquiry was initiated. It highlights the arbitrary nature of the judiciary’s administrative side.”

(Edited by Madhurita Goswami)