K S Radhakrishnan sworn in as CJ of Gujarat HC

{image-Chief Justice KS Radhakrishnan_05092008.jpg news.oneindia.in}Ahmedabad, Sep 5: Governor Nawal Kishore Sharma administered the oath of office to Chief Justice KS Radhakrishnan at Raj Bhavan in Gandhinagar. For past eight months, Justice Radhakrishnan was serving as Chief Justice of the High Court of Jammu and Kashmir.

He began practising as an advocate in the Kerala High Court in 1973 after obtaining a law degree from the Cochin University of Science and Technology. He was a member of Faculty of Law, Cochin University of Science and Technology and Fellow of ICPS New Delhi. He was appointed judge of Kerala High Court from May 1995 and then as Chief Justice in Jammu and Kashmir High Court in January this year. The swearing-in ceremony of Justice Radhakrishnan brought the hot debate in the Gujarat High Court Bar on non-Gujarati chief justices, to an end. For more than a year, there was a feeling among many advocates that the person holding the chair of Chief Justice should not be from outside Gujarat.

The protest among high court advocates reached a pitch with senior advocate Krishnakant Vakharia dashing off a letter to the Bar as well as other concerned forums calling for an end to the practice of having an outsider as chief justice in Gujarat. The letter claimed that the decade-old practice of appointing a judge from some other court as the chief justice of Gujarat has served no purpose in abolishing corruption, neither has it helped improve administration.

In March this year, additional advocate general Mihir Joshi also raised concerns over this practice and charged judges from outside Gujarat of ill-treating junior advocates in a letter, before he resigned from office. Vakharia still feels that there should be a nationwide debate on the issue. "We have experienced during the tenure of last four-five CJs that the Gujarat High Court has suffered a lot. We have some good traditions and I hope that our senior judges and advocates will apprise the new CJ with them to administer in better manner," Vakharia said.

On the other hand, the president of the Bar, Yatin Oza said, "The advocates' ire was actually because of the conduct of a certain former chief justice, and therefore the issue reached to the Supreme Court also."

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