Justice Surya Kant was sworn in as the 53rd Chief Justice of India (CJI) on Monday, November 24, replacing outgoing CJI Justice BR Gavai. Justice Surya Kant was sworn in as the Chief Justice of India at the Rashtrapati Bhavan. President Draupadi Murmu administers the oath to him.
Justice Kant was appointed as the next CJI on October 30 and will remain in office for nearly 15 months. He will relinquish his position on February 9, 2027 after reaching the age of 65.
Vice President CP Radhakrishnan and Prime Minister Narendra Modi were among the leaders who attended the ceremony.
CJI nominee Justice Surya Kant outlines priorities
A day before taking over as CJI, Justice Surya Kant said his primary focus would be to reduce the massive backlog of cases in the country’s courts, news agency ANI reported.
He said that arrears (pending cases) need to be addressed both at individual court level and on an all India basis.
One of the main challenges, he explained, is the overlapping of issues.
“Several important cases have been referred to constitution benches of 5, 7 or 9 judges and due to this, high courts and even the Supreme Court cannot entertain many other cases,” Justice Surya Kant said.
“Thousands of cases are on hold as they await decisions from these larger panels,” the judge added. As a result, the High Courts and District Courts are also stuck due to many legal issues that remain unresolved,” he said.
Who is Judge Kant?
Early Life of Judge Kant: Justice Kant was born on 10 February 1962 in Hisar district of Haryana to a middle-class family. He rose from a small-town lawyer to the highest judicial office in the land, where he was involved in several judgments and orders of national importance and constitutional matters.
Judge Kant’s early education: Graduated LLB from Maharishi Dayanand University, Rohtak (1984). He later obtained ‘First Class First’ honors in his Masters in Law in 2011 from Kurukshetra University.
Notable career of Judge Kant: He was appointed Chief Justice of the Himachal Pradesh High Court on 5 October 2018. His tenure as a Supreme Court judge is marked by verdicts on the repeal of Article 370, freedom of expression and civil rights.
Profile of Justice Surya Kant
Notable judgments of Judge Kant
1. Justice Kant has written several notable judgments in the Punjab and Haryana HC. It was part of a recent presidential reference to the powers of the governor and president to discuss bills passed by the state assembly. The verdict is eagerly awaited with potential ramifications across states.
2. He was part of the bench that kept the colonial-era Sedition Act in abeyance and ordered that no new FIRs be registered under it pending a government review.
3. Justice Kant also nudged the Election Commission to release details of the 65 million voters excluded from the draft electoral rolls in Bihar while hearing a number of petitions challenging the Election Commission’s decision to conduct a special intensive review (SIR) of the electoral roll in the poll-bound state.
4. In an order that emphasized people’s democracy and gender justice, he led the bench that reinstated a woman sarpanch who had been illegally removed from office and highlighted gender bias in the matter.
5. He is also credited with ordering that one-third of the seats at the Bar, including the Supreme Court Bar, be reserved for women.
6. Justice Kant was part of the bench that appointed a five-member committee headed by former Supreme Court judge Justice Indu Malhotra to probe the security breach during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Punjab in 2022, saying such matters required “just a trained mind”.
7. He also supported the One Rank-One Pension system for the defense forces, calling it constitutionally valid, and continues to hear petitions from officers in the armed forces seeking parity in permanent commission.
8. Justice Kant was in the seven-judge bench that set aside the Aligarh Muslim University judgment of 1967, paving the way for a review of the institution’s minority status.
9. He was also part of the bench that heard the Pegasus spyware case, which appointed a group of cyber experts to investigate allegations of illegal surveillance, famously declaring that the state could not get a “free pass under the guise of national security”.
(With input from agencies)
