Comment

Should judges retired from the supreme court accept or be given gubernatorial positions or such assignments that are monetarily lucrative?

There is division of opinion among the incumbents who have served the judiciary for decades and are left to fend for themselves later. After his retirement as chief justice of India in 1994, justice MN Venkatachaliah told this journalist in an interview that since it’s the conscious decision taken by an eligible person to become a judge, he must retire as that without accepting or aspiring for a lucrative post retirement assignment. He hasn’t accepted any except that he headed a parliamentary panel set up to review the constitution and to ascertain whether ‘we failed the constitution or the constitution failed us’.

Fourteen years have passed since Justice Venkatachaliah made the statement which was much against what many from his fraternity might feel. However, one of his successors, justice JS Verma has now echoed the same concern. Justice Verma feels that the lure of post superannuation options could prejudice the judicial functioning.
Similar concerns have been expressed by Parliamentary Standing Committee on Law and justice EMS Natchiappan. “There is a feeling that judges who are offered post-retirement assignments start accommodating powerful decision-makers in the immediate period before retirement,” he says.

The Venkatachaliah panel had suggested increasing retirement age of apex court judges to 68 and 65 years for high court judges. In the US, there’s no age of retirement for federal judges. If a federal judge feels that by reason of old age he cannot function, he will receive the last drawn salary as pension for the rest of his life. In England, judges retire at the age of 75.

Talking on the age of superannuation for judges, Jawaharlal Nehru, himself a lawyer, told the Constituent Assembly on May 24, 1949 that, “With regard to judges and Federal Court judges especially, we cannot proceed on the lines of normal administrative services. We require top men in the administrative services. Nevertheless, the type of work that a judge does is somewhat different.”

But what Nehru wanted, or what the retired Judges want now is possible only when merit alone is the criteria for appointment of a judge.