Justice Chinnaswamy Swaminathan Karnan, the first sitting high court judge in India to be sentenced to jail for contempt of court, died at a hospital in Chennai on the morning of November 13. He was 71.

Justice Karnan served on the Madras and Calcutta High Courts for a little over eight years. He is best remembered for one clash with the Supreme Court in 2017 that led to a six-month jail sentence from seven of its most senior judges. The episode also drew from two of those judges questions on how judges are chosen and how an errant one may be corrected. Both questions have outlived him.

He was born on June 12, 1955, to a Dalit family in Karnatham, a village near Virudhachalam in Cuddalore district, Tamil Nadu. He was the second of eight children of Chinnaswamy Swaminathan, a schoolteacher who received the President’s Award for Teachers, and Kamalam, a homemaker. He studied at the Adi Dravidar school in his village and a government school in nearby Mangalampet before joining the pre-university course at the Government Arts College, Virudhachalam.

He then moved to Chennai, where he studied for a science degree at The New College and a law degree at the Madras Law College, graduating in 1983. That year he enrolled with the Bar Council of Tamil Nadu and began a civil practice. As a lawyer he served as legal adviser to the Chennai Metropolitan Water Supply and Sewerage Board, as a government advocate in civil suits, and as standing counsel for the Union government. In 1991, at the suggestion of his wife, Saraswathi, he changed his given name from Karunanidhi to Karnan.

The Madras High Court collegium, then headed by Chief Justice A.K. Ganguly, who later became a judge of the Supreme Court, recommended his appointment. He was elevated to the court as an additional judge on March 30, 2009, and made permanent two years later. Justice K. Chandru, a retired judge of the court, later called him a “standing monument” to the fact that the collegium system of appointing judges is not foolproof.

Within three years of his appointment, discord with his colleagues surfaced. In November 2011, as Frontline recounted in its cover story “Judge vs judges” (June 9, 2017), Justice Karnan complained to the National Commission for Scheduled Castes that fellow judges were humiliating him because he was a Dalit.

He continued to make the same charge in letters to chief justices, the Prime Minister, and the police for the next five years, adding allegations of corruption and personal misconduct against named colleagues. Successive chief justices of the Madras High Court had sought his transfer, and 20 of its sitting judges had jointly asked for the same.

In April 2015 he went further and, on his own motion, stayed administrative orders of the chief justice on the recruitment of judicial officers. Within two weeks, the Supreme Court stayed his order and restrained him from hearing the matter. When a proposal to transfer him to the Calcutta High Court came in February 2016, he stayed that too. The Supreme Court responded by limiting him to cases the chief justice specifically assigned to him. The following month he took charge.

Contempt proceedings

Justice Karnan wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi on January 23, 2017, alleging corruption by 20 sitting and retired judges. The seven senior-most judges of the Supreme Court took up the matter suo motu, or on the court’s own initiative, on February 8. The bench was headed by then Chief Justice of India J.S. Khehar and comprised Justices Dipak Misra, J. Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, Madan B. Lokur, Pinaki Chandra Ghose, and Kurian Joseph.

The bench issued him a notice for criminal contempt and relieved him of all judicial and administrative duties. The contempt alleged was scandalising the court, which, under the Contempt of Courts Act, 1971, covers any publication that lowers or tends to lower a court’s authority.

Justice Karnan missed the first two hearings and appeared in court on March 31 only after the court issued a bailable warrant against him. In his oral submissions, he repeated the allegations and tendered a letter withdrawing his complaint and unconditionally apologising. As he walked out of the court, he said he might be sent to jail but would not come before the bench again, according to the judgment. He refused to undergo a medical examination ordered by the court to assess his fitness to defend himself, telling the doctors he was in sound health.

During these weeks he issued a series of orders claiming judicial authority although his work had been withdrawn.

On May 9, 2017, the Supreme Court found him guilty of contempt “of the gravest nature”, sentenced him to six months in prison, and directed that no further statements by him be published. Senior counsel K.K. Venugopal, appearing for the Registrar General of the Madras High Court, urged the bench to wait until the judge retired in June because punishing a serving judge would tarnish the institution’s image.

The bench did not wait. “This has never happened. This should never happen,” Justice Khehar wrote in the reasoned judgment.

Frontline’s cover story, “Justice without fairness”, noted that the bench convicted and sentenced him on the same day and deferred its reasons. “To convict without giving reasons appears inappropriate to me,” senior advocate Raju Ramachandran told the magazine.

D. Raja, then national secretary of the CPI, said the Supreme Court should have ordered an inquiry into the judge’s allegations or left the matter to Parliament, which alone can remove a judge. “It is not a healthy precedent,” he said.

Justice Karnan evaded arrest for six weeks and retired in June. A West Bengal police team arrested him on the night of June 20, 2017, near Coimbatore. He served the full term in the Presidency Correctional Home in Kolkata and walked out on December 20 that year.

The reasons for the conviction came in two opinions in July 2017. Justice Khehar, writing for five judges, said none of the allegations was supported by any material and that Justice Karnan had sheltered behind his caste.

Justices Chelameswar and Gogoi, who agreed with the conviction, were more careful in their words. They said the allegations were too vague to examine in a contempt proceeding but that, if any were true, the matter was too serious to leave alone. They added that no constitutional authority had ever found it necessary to act on his allegations and that complainants cannot judge their own complaints.

The concurring opinion then turned to the system that had put him on the bench. It said the case showed that the process of selecting judges needed review, because the system did not assess his personality when his name was recommended. It also noted that there was no legal regime for correcting a judge’s conduct by measures short of impeachment, the process under the Constitution by which Parliament may remove a judge of the Supreme Court or a high court for proved misbehaviour or incapacity.

The two judges also observed that Britain, from which India inherited the offence of scandalising the court, had abolished it. “May be it is time for the nation to debate this issue,” they wrote.

After prison

More trouble followed his release. In May 2018 he floated a political outfit, the Anti-Corruption Dynamic Party, and announced plans to contest the 2019 Lok Sabha election.

The Chennai Police booked him in October 2020 for posting videos containing abusive remarks against judges, their spouses, and women lawyers. He was arrested on December 2, after the Madras High Court questioned the delay in acting against him. He had been suffering from severe depression since his retirement, he submitted in his bail plea before the Madras High Court. The court denied bail in February 2021 and granted it, with conditions, on March 23 that year.

Justice Karnan, to his supporters, was a Dalit judge who was punished for speaking out against caste and corruption in the judiciary. To the Supreme Court, he made grave charges without substance and then used his judicial office to pursue them. The judgment reproduced his letters and orders at length in support of its reading of his conduct.

His first complaint of caste discrimination within the Madras High Court has not been the subject of any recorded inquiry and remains untested either way.

M.P. Raju, an advocate practising in the Supreme Court, wrote at the time that the Karnan of the Mahabharata was killed while freeing the stuck wheel of his chariot, after his plea for time was rejected. A constitutional democracy, he argued, owes even the guilty the fairness that the epic denied his namesake.

When he died, the larger debate that Justices Chelameswar and Gogoi had called for, on choosing judges with greater care and on correcting them short of impeachment, was still in progress.

V. Venkatesan is a Contributing Editor at Supreme Court Observer.

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