NEW DELHI: Justice Jasti Chelameswar, the senior-most judge of the Supreme Court, who led three senior judges to an unprecedented press conference, mounting a virtual revolt against Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra, retired on Friday after a nearly seven-year tenure in the top court.



  • Born on June 23, 1953 in Pedda Muttevi, Movya Mandal in Krishna district of Andhra Pradesh, he had his early education at Hindu High School at Machilipatnam in Krishna district and graduated in Physics from Loyola College in Chennai (then Madras). He attained his law degree from Andhra University, Visakhapatnam, in 1976.

  • He was designated as a senior counsel in 1995 and appointed as additional advocate general of Andhra Pradesh on October 13, 1995. Justice Chelameswar was elevated as an additional judge of Andhra Pradesh High Court on June 23, 1997 and as a judge with effect from May 17, 1999.

  • He was elevated as the chief justice of the Gauhati High Court on May 3, 2007 and later transferred to the Kerala High Court. He assumed the charge as the chief justice of the Kerala High Court on March 17, 2010. Justice Chelameswar was elevated as a judge of the Supreme Court on October 10, 2011.

  • Along with justices Ranjan Gogoi, M B Lokur and Kurian Joseph, he had raised questions on "selective" allocation of cases, including the sensitive case of special CBI judge B H Loya, who died on December 1, 2014. The press meet on January 12 , the first in the chequered history of the Supreme Court, had sent waves in the court's corridors and caught the nation by surprise.

  • Justice Chelameswar, who turns 65 on Friday, was part of the nine-judge bench that gave the historic verdict declaring right to privacy a fundamental right. In a separate but concurring verdict, Justice Chelameswar had said in August last year that fundamental rights were the only constitutional firewall to prevent State's interference with those core freedoms constituting liberty of a human being.

  • Justice Chelameswar was also part of the bench that had struck down controversial section 66A of the Information Technology Act which provided the law enforcement agencies the power to arrest a person for posting offensive contents on web the grounds of violation of fundamental rights.

  • He was also heading the three-judge bench that had referred the pleas against Aadhaar to the larger bench while making it clear that no person shall be deprived of social benefits due to want of the 12-digit national unique identification number (Aadhaar).

  • In an unusual step, Justice Chelameswar had refused the invitation of the Supreme Court Bar Association to participate in his farewell function. However, he followed the tradition and sat on the bench along with CJI Misra on May 18, his last working day in the apex court before it closed for the summer vacation.

  • He also was lauded by top lawyers for his judicial approach, with former law minister Shanti Bhushan even equating him with Justice H R Khanna, the lone dissenting voice in the verdict that had upheld the suspension of fundamental rights during the Emergency. He batted for transparency in the functioning of the Collegium.

  • Recently, a bench comprising justices Chelameswar and S Abdul Nazeer ruled that politicians, their spouses and dependents would now have to declare their sources of income, along with their assets, for contesting elections. In another landmark judgement, the apex court had passed a slew of measures to reform the electoral process, observing that the "purity" of the electoral process was fundamental to the "survival of a healthy democracy".