The defence rests

Justice for the Judge: An autobiography

Author: Ranjan Gogoi

Publisher: Rupa
Pages: 249

Price: Rs 595

Ranjan Gogoi was the 46th Chief Justice of India for 13 months between October 2018 and November 2019. He is currently a member of the Rajya Sabha.

This is not an autobiography in the usual sense of the term. His approach to his book is that of a lawyer presenting his side of the case. There’s only an infinitesimal account of his personal or intellectual life.

We also learn nothing about his childhood, which must have been a very privileged one because his father was an important politician of Assam. We don’t get to know anything about his family, friends, colleagues, competitors, teacher, heroes and so on. The most glaring omission is of intellectual influences.

That’s why this book is more a set of essays to set the record straight, an account of what happened — according to him. We don’t know what’s been left out, which is a pity.

He says he had promised himself in 1978, when he was returning to Assam from Delhi, that he would return as a judge of the Supreme Court. In April 2012, he was sworn in. In October 2018, he was made Chief Justice. He says it was from a newspaper report that he learnt that he had a chance of becoming one. “At no point of time earlier had any such possibility been a part of my calculations.”

Being Chief Justice is not easy. Indeed, being a judge is not easy either. The best explanation for the difficulties that judges face can be found, albeit given in an altogether different context, in a book called Noise by three economists, one of whom is a Nobel laureate.

They say “noise” is different from “bias”. Noise, they say, is when “people who are expected to agree end up at very different points around the target.”

Bias is predictable but noise is not. Noise is also more ubiquitous than we realise. And it is critical to judgment. That’s why juries are sequestered.

According to these economists, we see this all too often in group decision-making where everyone wants the same thing but ends up making very different suggestions as to how to get it.

Benches of courts must surely face this problem. Interestingly, Justice Gogoi also makes reference to noise but in the context of what he called “noisy” judges who defy convention.

The five-judge bench that delivered the Ayodhya judgment wrote different judgments, says Justice Gogoi. They were then merged into a single judgment. This was a way of eliminating the effects of “noise” though it is doubtful whether he had read the economists.

It’s a pity that Justice Gogoi doesn’t discuss the process by which collective decisions are arrived at in the judiciary as a whole. In fact, he himself could have become a victim of “noise” when he was being considered for elevation to the Supreme Court.

He had been quite ill for six months previously and the word was that he was not physically fit enough. In the event, his name was recommended by Justice Altamas Kabir, with whom Justice Gogoi spent an entire day while he was on an official visit to Chandigarh. The nomination was quickly accepted by the Collegium, which had been informed by Justice Kabir that Justice Gogoi was fully fit.

Justice Gogoi also has no issues with the Collegium system. He doesn’t engage with, or even acknowledge, the main problem that besets it, namely, Russell’s Paradox, which says that if there is a village in which the barber shaves only those who don’t shave themselves, who shaves the barber? Equivalently, who judges the judges?

This is another example of Justice Gogoi’s disinclination in the book to engage with the larger issues of the judiciary. In that sense, the book disappoints. It has no bibliography, either.

There’s also virtually no discussion of a judiciary’s relationship with their ancient adversaries, governments. The thing is, though, that this battle has been going on all over the world at least since 1618.

However, we do learn a lot about how the judicial system functions. The rosters system that created such a hubbub is only one example. He and three other judges had famously criticised the roster system under Chief Justice Dipak Misra. Later Justice Gogoi distanced himself from the whole affair.

There are many examples, including the way in which the system worked when he was accused of sexual harassment. He was given a clean chit by the inquiry committee of which he says he was not a member as alleged. The title of the book was a result of that trauma.