Retired supreme court judge Markandey Katju on Tuesday responded fiercely to the nomination of former chief justice of India Ranjan Gogoi to the Rajya Sabha.
“I have been a lawyer for 20 yrs and a judge for another 20. I have known many good judges & many bad judges. But I have never known any judge in the Indian judiciary as shameless & disgraceful as this sexual pervert Ranjan Gogoi. There was hardly any vice which was not in this man,” justice Katju tweeted.
Katju had spoken out against Gogoi before. In January, he responded to the Supreme Court’s decision to reinstate a woman employee who had been dismissed after accusing Gogoi of sexual misconduct, calling Gogoi a “rascal and a rogue”.
Gogoi had called the charges a conspiracy to “deactivate the office of the CJI”, denying all of them outright and saying that they came at a time when the court was due to hear “very very important cases”.
The woman sparked a media frenzy when a letter written by her to 22 judges of the Supreme Court in April 2019 went public. The letter contains allegations of how Gogoi groped her. The woman also alleged her husband and brother-in-law, both constables in the Delhi Police, were suspended after she was terminated from the Supreme Court. However, the two men rejoined the Delhi Police in June 2019.
Gogoi was cleared of the charges raised in the letter in May 2019 by an 'in-house' committee of Supreme Court justices comprising current Chief Justice of India S.A. Bobde and Justices N.V. Ramana and Indira Banerjee.
In April 2019, the SC formed a one-man panel headed by Justice A.K. Patnaik to probe allegations that there was such a conspiracy after a lawyer claimed he was offered up to Rs 1.5 crore to frame a “false case of sexual harassment” against the CJI. The findings of the probe were submitted to the apex court in September.
Katju retired from the Supreme Court in 2011, where he had served since 2006. Gogoi retired on November 16, a week after pronouncing the verdict in the Ayodhya Ram Janambhoomi-Babri Masjid case along with justices Sharad Arvind Bobde, Dhananjaya Y. Chandrachud, Ashok Bhushan and S. Abdul Nazeer.
