Eighth chief justice from Maharashtra, SA Bobde sworn in as 47th CJI
Sharad A Bobde has been sworn-in as the Chief Justice of India by President Ram Nath Kovind at a simple ceremony at Rashtrapati Bhavan on Monday morning. Chief Justice Bobde is the eighth chief justice from Maharashtra, will have a tenure of a little over 18 months.
Chief Justice Bobde was part of the benches of the Supreme Court that delivered the historic verdict in the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid title suit that ruled in favour of the construction of a Ram temple at Ayodhya and upheld the right to privacy as a fundamental right.
He will have to set up the seven-judge bench that a bench-led by Supreme Court has decided should be set up to hear the review of its 2018 verdict on ending the gender-based restrictions on the entry of women to Sabarimala. This will be the third Supreme Court bench to hear the case.
SA Bobde was elevated to the Supreme Court in April 2012 after serving as chief justice of the Madhya Pradesh high court. Justice Bobde, who is from Maharashtra, studied law at Nagpur University.
Family background of CJI SA Bobde
His grandfather and father were both lawyers, began practising law in 1978 before the Nagpur bench of the Bombay high court. Born in 1956, Justice Bobde was designated as a senior advocate in 1998 and elevated to the high court as an additional judge in March 2000.
The 47th Chief Justice has been part of benches that have delivered many landmark verdicts. One of them is the nine-judge bench that backed privacy as a fundamental right and held that the “right to privacy is inextricably bound up with all exercises of human liberty” in 2017.
He was also a member of the bench that ruled that no Indian citizen could be deprived of basic services and government subsidies because he or she didn’t have an Aadhaar card.
Justice Bobde has played a key role at the top court. In May 2019, he headed the three-judge committee that heard sexual harassment allegations against CJI Gogoi by a staff member from the CJI’s office in April 2019. The committee found “no substance in the allegations”.
