Saturday 8 August, 2009

Adios Mr. Sinha

Justice SB Sinha sat on the Supreme Court bench for the last time today. Considering that two Judges have already retired this year before him (LS Panta and Arijit Pasayat), and one more is due to follow (BN Agarwal), it does not appear to be a significant enough occassion to merit a special mention.

But the fact of the matter is that it does. Most around the Supreme Court knew Justice Sinha as the quintessential book-worm, the man who had no life outside his judgments. And the judgments, ah those Judgments, did not let that image down. You just have to pick up any volume of a SCALE or any other journal of the last couple of years to note his overwhelming presence in those pages. Actually, why bother with a subscriber's copy of a journal, you can go through the posts on this blog to realize what I mean.

Justice Sinha gave us the law - neatly compiled, condensed and presented with illuminating para headings for the impatient, all while incidentally deciding the factual dispute at hand. These were the kind of judgments we fashionably bitched about in law school as being the malady of the Indian Judiciary, but thanked god for them when last last date for project submission drew close.

The judgments are not the reason behind this post though. In a court that is ridiculously impatient with all lawyers except a chosen few, and ridiculously over-indulgent with those few, Justice Sinha (as he then was) was one of the few who heard those who spoke sense with patience, and did not cringe at issuing notice and granting interim relief while exercising "exceptional" jurisdiction under Article 136. He did not have mathematical formulae for dismissing SLPs in Anticipatory Bail or Quashing or NDPS or other such typically frowned upon matters.

It is often said that the Supreme Court of India is actually the Supreme Courts of India, with the 12 benches offering a wide variety of approaches towards similar matters. As lawyers we tend to ascribe the dismissal of a good case to the particular Judge it came before and rush for the next one in a business-as-usual manner, but for the litigant it presents a sad end to a long journey, that cannot easily be digested as being attributable to the idiosyncracies of a particular person.

Justice Sinha did not leave the lawyer, at least me, with that feeling at the end of a dismissal. And that is why he will be missed.

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