“Though I am a Hindu, I believe in the gospel of Jesus:” SC Justice Banumathi at her farewell function...
Justice R Banumathi, the second woman ever to sit on the Supreme Court Collegium, retired from the service on Friday with a three-decade-long career behind her.
Some key judgements
In 2006, as a Madras High Court judge Justice Banumathi had banned the Hindu traditional Jallikattu sport in the state – interestingly, that judgement was passed by unilaterally expanding the scope of a case where the petitioner was seeking permission for rekla (bullock cart) race.
In 2009, Justice Bhanumathi endorsed Government control over Hindu temples when she rejected a plea against appointment of a Government executive officer for the famous fifth-century Natarajar Temple at Chidambaram.
While hearing the bail pleas of Chidambaram in the Supreme Court, she had rejected the prosecution’s contention that the latter was likely to flee the country, granting him bail in the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) case related to allegations of bribery in the INX Media case.
Banumathi was also part of a nine-judge bench that refused to re-examine the top court’s twin rulings that established and institutionalised the collegium system. The collegium system in place since 1993 to appoint judges to Bharat’s higher courts has been criticised as ‘opaque and arbitrary’ by many. In 2016, then SC Justice Jasti Chelameswar, one of the five senior judges in the collegium at the time, refused to attend the SC collegium meetings headed by CJI calling them “most opaque”, and that the “majority gangs up” to shoot down genuine objections against undesirable candidates.
Modi government’s proposal to form a NJAC (National Judicial Appointments Commission) to involve more Constitutional appointees in a transparent process of judicial appointments has been repeatedly rejected by the Supreme Court. Even a new Memorandum of Procedure (MoP) for the appointment of judges is yet to be finalised because of continued disagreements over it between the Centre and the SC for more than four years.
