It is most unfortunate. Something is going wrong; they are not to be blamed. They must have been reminding or insisting with the Chief Justice from time to time that the system should be cleaned. There is every possibility that they must have been sidetracked. There was no other option than reacting in the media.
— Pramod Kamat, retired district judge
I am deeply hurt and anguished. The Supreme Court, the highest repository of public conscience is a divided house. The allegations are extremely serious. Democracy is in peril. No outside interference can resurrect the Supreme Court. The full court must address the issues expeditiously. The damage has to be undone by an equally unprecedented measure. Will the CJI and the four judges step down and pave way for a new order in the Supreme Court? If the public loses confidence in the justice delivery system it is an invitation for chaos and ultimately the victim will be democracy.
— Adv Ramakant Khalap, former Union Minister for Law
The four judges have officially confirmed what the general public has always been suspecting that something is drastically wrong with the judicial set up. For lawyers it is no surprise. The four judges deserve to be congratulated to have had the courage to expose the wrong is their own house. Everybody lives in a dream world that the SC is above everything while the truth is otherwise. The need now is to set our house in order and earlier the better.
— Adv Radharao Gracias
The four judges are the senior most judges of the court and are known to be sober, competent and their integrity has never been questioned. When they make a grievance in public there must be something that has gone wrong that prompted them to take a drastic step. The question is whether should they have gone to the press. This is a question of propriety and when it comes to constitutional values, propriety comes secondary, and if you have given a go by to propriety to uphold constitutional value, it is great. I feel that the four have taken up an issue of the constitutional independence of judiciary and in the process have given a go by for the propriety. I think they should be excused in that, as in the larger picture of the independence of the judiciary, they did a substantial justice to the cause.
— Adv Cleofato Coutinho
It is a quite a serious matter as the four senior most judges of the Supreme Court of India, who have a very clean track record, are saying that the Chief Justice is manipulating the roster. The question and worry is, is there any interference of the executive? For judges to break their silence they must have been driven to the point of frustration and desperation to come before the press to say all is not well. There has to be a committee where the Supreme Court Bar Association president and senior lawyers investigate exactly what was the reason. My opinion is there is an interference of the executive in the distribution of work in crucial matters. It affects the independence of the judiciary. You can imagine when Supreme Court judges are expressing helplessness before media, what the High Court judges must be going through.
— Adv Rohit Braz D’Sa
