MPs Submit Motion In Both Parliament Houses To Impeach Justice Yashwant Varma

The impeachment proceedings to remove Justice Yashwant Verma, over the alleged unaccounted cash recovery at his official residence, have been formally initiated today after a notice of impeachment, sponsored by 145 members of Lok Sabha including and 63 members of Rajya Sabha, was submitted to the Lok Sabha Speaker, Om Birla and the Vice-President and ex-officio Chairman of Rajya Sabha, Jagdeep Dhankhar, respectively.

Submitting the notice of impeachment to the Lok Sabha Speaker, Bharatiya Janta Party MP Ravi Shankar Prasad said to ANI: "This is a constitutional process. The conduct of an individual judge in terms of propriety is equally important for independence of the judiciary. Since the allegations were serious, we have filed our notice in this regard. We will follow the proceedings under the Judges (Inquiry) Act, but we have requested that the proceedings be initiated soon."

As per the law, a judge can be removed from office under Articles 124 and 217 of the Constitution on grounds of "proved misbehaviour" or "incapacity". To initiate the proceedings, a notice of impeachment has to be sponsored by at least 100 Lok Sabha members or 50 Rajya Sabha members. The Presiding Officer (Speaker) will then verify the notice of impeachment, and if he decides to admit it, he has to then constitute a three-member Committee consisting of the CJI/Judge, CJ of the High Court and one distinguished jurist. The committee's work will be governed under the Judges (Inquiry) Act, 1968.

If the Committee finds the allegation true in its report, the report is then tabled in the House for discussion and voting. No judge in the history of Indian judiciary has been impeached, but we have seen failed impeachment proceedings against Justice V Ramaswami in 1993 and Justice Soumitra Sen in 2011.

For Justice Varma to be impeached, a majority of not less than 2/3rd present and voting should agree to the removal of the judge. 

The issue relates to the accidental discovery of a huge pile of currency notes at an outhouse of the official residence of Justice Varma, then a judge of the Delhi High Court, during a fire-fighting operation on March 14.

After the discovery led to a huge public controversy, the then CJI Sanjiv Khanna constituted an in-house inquiry committee of three judges- Justice Sheel Nagu (then Chief Justice of Punjab & Haryana High Court), Justice GS Sandhawalia (then Chief Justice of Himachal Pradesh High Court), and Justice Anu Sivaraman (Judge, Karnataka High Court). Justice Varma was repatriated to the Allahabad High Court, and judicial work was withdrawn from him pending the inquiry.

The committee submitted its report to CJI Khanna in May, which the CJI forwarded to the President and the Prime Minister for further action, after Justice Varma refused to heed the CJI's advice to resign.

The 3-judge in-house inquiry committee termed Justice Varma's conduct after the fire incident on March 14 - which led to the discovery of the currency notes - unnatural, leading to certain adverse inferences against him.

After examining 55 witnesses, including Justice Varma and his daughter, and electronic evidence in the form of videos and photographs taken by the members of the fire brigade, the committee held that cash was found in his official premises. Finding that the storeroom was within the “covert or active control of Justice Varma and his family members”, the committee held that the burden was upon him to explain the presence of cash. Since the judge could not discharge his burden by offering a plausible explanation, except giving a "flat denial or a bald plea of conspiracy", the committee found sufficient grounds to propose action against him.

Justice Varma has filed a writ petition before the Supreme Court contending that the mere recovery of cash from the outhouse of his official residence does not establish his culpability, as the in-house inquiry committee has not determined the ownership of the cash or how it was removed from the premises.

Last December, an impeachment notice to impeach Justice Shekhar Kumar Yadav, Judge of the Allahabad High Court, over the alleged communal speech at a VHP event was submitted to the Secretary General of Rajya Sabha by Senior Advocates and MP from Rajya Sabha, Kapil Sibal and P Wilson and others. The motion was signed by 55 Rajya Sabha MPs, however, it remains pending before the Rajya Sabha chairman.