President Droupadi Murmu on Thursday appointed Justice Surya Kant as the 53rd Chief Justice of India.
Justice Kant, who is likely to take oath on November 24, will succeed CJI B R Gavai, who is due to retire on November 23.
“In exercise of the powers conferred by the Constitution of India, the President is pleased to appoint Shri Justice Surya Kant, Judge of the Supreme Court, as the Chief Justice of India with effect from 24 November 2024,” Union Minister for Law and Justice Arjun Ram Meghwal said in a post on X.
Justice Kant will have a relatively longer tenure of nearly 15 months – he is due to retire on February 10, 2027. He will also be the first CJI from Haryana.
Justice Surya Kant was born on February 10, 1962, in Haryana’s Hisar and obtained a degree in law from Punjab’s Maharshi Dayanand University. Hegan his legal practice at the Hisar District Court in 1984 and was the youngest Advocate General of Haryana at the age of 38. At 43, he was elevated a judge of the Punjab and Haryana High Court and served there for 14 years before being appointed Chief Justice of Himachal Pradesh High Court.
Justice Kant carries the tag of a first-generation lawyer from a small town as he takes over the highest judicial office. He is known to have a strong focus on ensuring access to justice to the common man, drawing from his early experiences as a lawyer. In the inaugural Supreme Court Bar Association (SCBA) lecture series, he spoke about the stark reality where “legal fees eclipse monthly incomes” of common people. “We have built temples of justice with doors too narrow for the very people they were meant to serve. The scales of justice cannot balance when only one side can afford to place their grievances upon them,” he said.
Justice Kant’s stern oral observations and decisions in cases involving free speech have stood out. In a case involving former BJP spokesperson Nupur Sharma in 2022, while refusing to grant protection, he had said that she was “single-handedly responsible for what is happening in the country”. While granting interim protection from arrest in the FIRs registered against podcaster-influencer Ranveer Allahbadia for his comments on a YouTube show, a bench headed by Justice Kant observed that “there is something that is dirty in his mind…” In two other cases of hate speech in May, involving Ashoka University professor Ali Khan Mahmudabad and Madhya Pradesh minister Vijay Shah, Justice Kant directed setting up of SIT investigation to ascertain whether the FIRs must be quashed.
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In his nearly six-year tenure in the Supreme Court, he has been part of several significant judgments, including the 2023 ruling on the abrogation of Article 370 of the Constitution; 2024 verdict on the minority tag to Aligarh Muslim University; the grant of bail to former Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal in 2024, and the bench that granted bail to Alt-News co-founder Mohammed Zubair in 2022. A bench he heads is currently overseeing the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision exercise in Bihar.
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