The Supreme Court had more than 1,000 cases marked as “sensitive” that were kept off its regular cause lists, a practice that exposed how the Chief Justice of India’s control over case allocation and listing could determine which matters came up for hearing, former top court judge Sanjay Kishan Kaul has written in his memoir “Without Fear or Favour”, crediting Justice Uday U Lalit with changing that approach during his brief tenure as the CJI.
The episode also highlights the extraordinary influence the CJI wields over the Supreme Court’s functioning, not only through the constitution of benches and allocation of cases, but also through decisions on what gets listed for hearing. Justice Lalit’s approach was part of a wider effort to address a long-standing backlog of important cases, the memoir highlights. Justice Kaul noted that no Constitution bench had been constituted during the tenure of Justice Lalit’s predecessor, Justice Ramana. The scale of the exercise was significant: several of the matters taken up by the Constitution benches were disposed of within six to eight months. For Justice Kaul, this demonstrated that the backlog was not simply a consequence of the court’s workload, but also of the way its business was organised and prioritised. But Justice Kaul’s account is not an unqualified endorsement of every aspect of Justice Lalit’s administrative approach. He expresses reservations about the pressure to meet ambitious daily disposal targets and the tendency to measure performance through the volume of cases listed or decided. The sheer number of matters handled, he suggests, cannot be the only measure of a court’s effectiveness.
On his first day as CJI, he convened a full-court meeting and moved to constitute six Constitution benches of five judges each to hear 30 pending matters.
To be sure, the CJI, as “master of the roster”, has the administrative authority to allocate cases to benches and determine their listing in the top court, giving the office considerable influence over which matters come up for hearing and when. “It demonstrated that the constitutional backlog was a failure of will and organization rather than of capacity,” he writes.
“On the whole, I had an excellent working relationship with Chief Justice Lalit. He organized another presentation to the full court while departing, on the work done during his time, and I think he can be justly proud of having made an impact,” Justice Kaul writes.
