From Our Bureau
NEW DELHI: Rajasthan Chief Justice Akil Kureshi on Saturday talked of retiring “with my pride intact that I made no decision based on its consequence for me,” in a farewell address on retirement on Sunday.
In the process, he might have bartered away his progress, but he said he would choose love and support of the Bar over progress.
On some negative perception of the government about him because of which his elevation to the Supreme Court was denied, he proudly affirmed that “as a judge of constitutional court, whose most primary duty is to protect fundamental and human rights of citizens, I consider it certificate of independence.”
“The love and affection that I have got from lawyers and collaegues wherever I went far outweighed any perceptible progress. I would not barter this for anything. If I ever I had to make choice between affection from all of you and the so called progress, I would gladly choose the former,” he said choking up.
Justice Kureshi, who joined the judiciary as a Gujarat High Court judge IN 2004, had a score of controversies and denial of his elevation as a Supreme Court judge, because he had fallen out with the Modi government purportedly because of his two judgments as a Gujarat High Court judge, the first in 2010 when he had remanded present Union Home Minister Amit Shah to two days of police custody in the Sohrabuddin Sheikh encounter case and again in 2012, when he upheld then Gujarat Governor Kamla Beniwal’s decision to appoint the state Lokayukta, without consulting then Chief Minister Narendra Modi.
