Justice Sharad Arvind Bobde is all set to be the 47th Chief Justice of India after President Ram Nath Kovind on Tuesday signed a warrant appointing the 63-year-old senior-most Supreme Court judge to the post. Bobde is scheduled to take charge of the top court on November 18, a day after the present CJI Ranjan Gogoi demits office.
The Presidential warrant follows the recommendation of the serving Chief Justice on October 18, who, as per convention, proposed Justice Bobde’s name as his successor. As in previous instances, the recommendation was sent a month before the current CJI demits office.
Justice Bobde was part of the five-judge constitution bench hearing the longest running Ayodhya land dispute case and in which the order is expected by November 18, before CJI Gogoi retires.
A native of Maharashtra, Justice Bobde is a third-generation lawyer and studied law at Nagpur University. The top court judge, whose grandfather and father were both lawyers, started out with law practice at the Nagpur bench of the Bombay high court.
Justice Bobde was elevated to the Supreme Court in April 2012 after serving as chief justice of the Madhya Pradesh high court. Justice Bobde was elevated to the high court as an additional judge in March 2000.
In his verdicts at the Supreme Court, Justice Bobde has backed privacy as a fundamental right and held that the “right to privacy is inextricably bound up with all exercises of human liberty”. He was also a member of the bench that ruled that no Indian citizen could be deprived of basic services and government subsidies because he didn’t have an Aadhaar card.
In 2017, he upheld the Karnataka government’s ban on a book on the grounds that it outraged the religious feelings of Lord Basavanna’s followers. He had also led the three-judge bench that first suspended the sale of firecrackers in the National Capital Region in 2016.
Prasanta Patnaik