President Ram Nath Kovind on Tuesday signed a warrant appointing Justice Sharad Arvind Bobde as the next Chief Justice of India. Justice Bobde, the next senior-most judge in the Supreme Court pecking order after CJI Ranjan Gogoi, will take oath on November 18. A judge since 2000, Justice Bobde joined the Bombay High Court as an additional judge. He was nominated as the Madhya Pradesh High Court Chief Justice in October 2012. In April 2013, he was elevated to the Supreme Court.
Justice Bobde was part of the in-house panel that probed the allegations of sexual harassment against CJI Gogoi. He was also on the five-judge bench hearing the Ayodhya land dispute case that just concluded hearings and is expected to announce the verdict before CJI Gogoi’s retirement. Justice Bobde’s term will end on April 23, 2021.
Born on 24 April 1956 at Nagpur, Maharashtra, Bobde hails from a family of illustrious lawyers. He is the grandson of a lawyer and son of Arvind Bobde, a former advocate-general of Maharashtra and a staunch Congressman. His elder brother who passed away in 2016, was also a Supreme Court lawyer. He passed his BA and LLB degrees from Nagpur University and got enrolled in the Roll of the Bar Council of Maharashtra in 1978.
Bobde practiced law at the Nagpur Bench of the Bombay High Court with appearances at Bombay before the Principal Seat and before the Hon’ble Supreme Court of India for over 21 years. He was designated as a senior advocate in 1998. Then in March 2000, after a 22 year-long career as a lawyer, Bobde was elevated to the Bench of the Bombay High Court as an additional judge. He later rose through the ranks to be sworn in as Chief Justice of Madhya Pradesh High Court on 16 October 2012. He was elevated as a judge of the Supreme Court of India on 12 April 2013. Justice Bobde is also the executive chairman of the National Legal Service Authority (NALSA) which is mandated to provide free legal services to the needy.
However, apart from delivering and authoring several key judgments, a little known and much-needed role Bobde played was of a peacekeeper in the time of one of the worst crisis that hit the top judiciary.
Justice Bobde was the one brokering peace between former chief justice of India Dipak Misra and the other members of collegium at the time — Justices J Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, Madan B Lokur and Kurian Joseph — when they decided to go public about a persistent rift within the judiciary over allocation of cases.