MP HC judge says SC judge got him moved out of Delhi

A judge of the Madhya Pradesh High Court Friday demanded that the powers of transferring a judge from one high court to another should be revisited as, he said, transfers had become a tool to tame "inconvenient judges".

The outburst by Justice S N Aggarwal of the Gwalior bench of the court came in his farewell speech on the eve of his retirement. Aggarwal, who was in the Delhi High Court before Gwalior, accused a sitting judge of the Supreme Court, with whom he had serious differences, of engineering his transfer out of the capital in "public interest" in 2010. But he did not name this judge.

He also said that he had written to Chief Justice of India S H Kapadia seeking the reason for his transfer, and also asked him to reconsider the shift.

Besides, he said he had mentioned that his wife was critically ill, and he needed to be in Delhi for her treatment. But his request was rejected. Aggarwal said that his wife subsequently passed away and he could not attend to her because of his displacement from Delhi to Madhya Pradesh.

"I have no hesitation in saying, and say it with utmost humility and respect at my command, that one of my senior colleagues, then a judge in Delhi High Court, with whom I had serious differences on various issues, on making it to the Supreme Court saw to it that I was sent out of Delhi High Court by using his close proximity which he has the knack of developing and which he developed ...with the head of judiciary," Aggarwal said in his speech, a copy of which is with The Indian Express.

"Transfer, I feel, is a tool in the hands of the concerned authorities to tame inconvenient judges. I am a victim of such misuse. I am conscious of the fact that our constitution envisages transfer of a judge from one high court to another but I very strongly feel that it is time now to revisit this power as it is being misused in the name of as vague a term as 'public interest'," he said.

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