Surya Kant Sworn In as 53rd Chief Justice: 10 Facts You Must Know

Justice Kant who was born on February 10, 1962, in Hisar, Haryana, is a middle-class family person. In 1981, he graduated from Government Postgraduate College, Hisar and in 1984, he attained his law degree from Maharishi Dayanand University, Rohtak.

He started his legal career in 1984 at the Hisar district court but moved to Chandigarh after a year to appear in the Punjab and Haryana High Court. He became Haryana’s youngest Advocate General in 2000. He also got the first position in his LLM from the Kurukshetra University in 2011.

Justice Kant got his position as Chief Justice of the Himachal Pradesh High Court in 2018 and was then promoted to the Supreme Court in 2019. He has since then been a part of several important decisions. Some of them are the presidential reference ruling on the powers and roles of governors and presidents in the case of state assembly bills, and the postponement of the colonial-era sedition law pending government review.

Besides that, he also significantly contributed to election-related issues and caused the Election Commission to give reason for the banning of 65 lakh voters from Bihar’s electoral rolls for the Special Intensive Revision prior to the recent assembly elections.

Justice Kant has supported gender justice in courts as well as in public offices. He was part of a bench that reinstated a woman sarpanch who had been unlawfully removed and thus brought to the fore gender discrimination in local governance. He also directed that one-third of the seats in all bar associations including the Supreme Court Bar Association should be reserved for women.

Security and accountability, too, had been among the issues he was responsible for. He was part of the five-member committee, along with a former Supreme Court judge, Justice Indu Malhotra, to look into the security lapses that had occurred during the visit of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Punjab in 2022.

Justice Kant also affirmed the One Rank-One Pension scheme for military personnel and he still hears the appeals of the female officers wanting equal rights to the permanent commission. He was assigned to the seven-honored bench that reversed the 1967 decision regarding the minority status of Aligarh Muslim University allowing the institution to be re-examined.

On cyber and privacy matters, he was involved in the Pegasus spyware case, which resulted in the formation of a group of cyber specialists with the purpose of investigating claims of illegal wiretaps. This decision also made it clear that national security could not be used as an all-encompassing cover for the government.