The Supreme Court collegium on Friday recommended the elevation of Calcutta High Court acting Chief Justice Rajesh Bindal as chief justice of Allahabad High Court, the country’s largest high court with a sanctioned strength of 160 judges.
The collegium offered some cheer to another judge who had sent Amit Shah to CBI custody and since then lost out on several prestigious postings.
Tripura High Court Chief Justice Akil Kureshi, left out by the collegium last month from a list of candidates for elevation to the Supreme Court, has been recommended for transfer to Rajasthan High Court.
Justice Kureshi had remanded Shah in CBI custody in 2010 in the Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter case. In 2019, the Narendra Modi government refused the collegium’s recommendation to elevate Justice Kureshi as chief justice of Madhya Pradesh High Court.
The collegium, headed by then Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi, eventually recommended elevating Justice Kureshi as Tripura High Court chief justice and the Centre obliged.
Tripura High Court has a sanctioned strength of four judges while its Madhya Pradesh counterpart has 40. Rajasthan High Court has a sanctioned strength of 50 judges.
Overall, the collegium of Chief Justice of India N.V. Ramana and Justices U.U. Lalit and A.M. Khanwilkar recommended the elevation of eight judges as high court chief justices, and the transfer of five chief justices and 28 other high court judges.
New CJs (recommended): Allahabad (Rajesh Bindal), Calcutta (Prakash Srivastava), Andhra Pradesh (Prashant Kumar Mishra), Karnataka (Ritu Raj Awasthi), Telangana (Satish Chandra Sharma), Meghalaya (Ranjit V. More), Gujarat (Aravind Kumar) and Madhya Pradesh (R.V. Malimath).
CJ transfers (recommended): Arup Kumar Goswami (Andhra Pradesh to Chhattisgarh), Mohd Rafiq (Madhya Pradesh to Himachal Pradesh), Akil Qureshi (Tripura to Rajasthan), Indrajit Mahanty (Rajasthan to Tripura) and Biswanath Somadder (Meghalaya to Sikkim).
