Justice Varma and the winding road to an impeachment

The impending motion to impeach high court judge Yashwant Varma has placed the judiciary at the center of a storm, reviving an old but complex debate about accountability, propriety, and procedure when it comes to constitutional court judges.

- Utkarsh Anand

NEW DELHI: On Tuesday, parliamentary affairs minister Kiren Rijiju said that the government has reached out to the Opposition to seek support for the motion during the Monsoon session of Parliament. The motion will be introduced by Union law minister Arjun Ram Meghwal and follows the alleged discovery of unaccounted cash from the Delhi residence of Justice Varma earlier this year.

While the government seems to have now taken a decisive step, questions continue to swirl around the process followed so far. On May 19, Vice President and Rajya Sabha Chairman Jagdeep Dhankhar questioned the legitimacy of the in-house inquiry conducted by a panel of three judges set up by the then Chief Justice of India (CJI), Sanjiv Khanna. Speaking at a book launch event, Dhankhar said the panel's findings "do not have any constitutional premise or legal sanctity but most importantly it will be inconsequential," and strongly underscored the need for a formal criminal probe.

These twin developments—Rijiju's statement of political outreach and Dhankhar's critique of the judicial inquiry—have added urgency to public understanding of what exactly happened, what the constitutional process of impeachment entails, how the judiciary's internal mechanisms work, and what lies ahead.