JS Khehar to be appointed as CJI, first from the Sikh community to hold post

Justice Khehar will have a short tenure of a little over seven months -from January 4 till August 28. He earned a place in history when the fivejudge bench headed by him shot down the National Judicial Appointments Commission, a body being set up through a constitutional amendment unanimously passed by Parliament to select judges for the SC and HCs.

Justice Khehar authored the lead judgment and termed the NJAC a threat to independence of judiciary as the law minister was part of the committee to select judges. However, he took into account the strong criticism of the opaque procedure employed by the SC-devised collegium system to select persons for appointment as judges and directed the government to redraft the Memorandum of Procedure (MoP) for judges’ appointment and make it more transparent.

The non-finalisation of MoP has been a handle for the government to counter the present CJI, who has accused the Centre of sitting over recommendations for appointment of judges. The ball, which was thrown into the Centre’s court on December 15, 2015 on framing of MoP, will now be back in Justice Khehar’s court after he assumes charge. The MoP finalisation and filling up of nearly 500 judges’ posts in the higher judiciary, including seven in the SC, would be one of the foremost tasks before Justice Khehar and his senior colleagues in the SC.