CJI Ranjan Gogoi recommends justice SA Bobde as his successor

Justice Sharad Arvind Bobde is likely to take over as the 47th Chief Justice of India (CJI) after Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi recommended him as his successor to the Centre on Friday, people familiar with the development said.

Justice Bobde, 63, who is likely to be sworn in on November 18 - a day after Gogoi retires - is the second senior-most judge of the Supreme Court. Gogoi has stuck to convention by recommending his name to the law ministry for the presidential order appointing him CJI. As in previous years, the recommendation has been sent a month before the current CJI demits office.

Justice Bobde will, as CJI, have a tenure of a little over 18 months.

Justice Bobde was elevated to the Supreme Court in April 2012 after serving as chief justice of the Madhya Pradesh high court. A native of Maharashtra, Justice Bobde is a third-generation lawyer and studied law at Nagpur University. The top court judge, whose grandfather and father were both lawyers, started out practising law at the Nagpur bench of the Bombay high court.

Justice Bobde was elevated to the high court as an additional judge in March 2000.

In his verdicts at the Supreme Court, Justice Bobde has backed privacy as a fundamental right and held that the “right to privacy is inextricably bound up with all exercises of human liberty”.

He was also a member of the bench that ruled that no Indian citizen could be deprived of basic services and government subsidies because he didn’t have an Aadhaar card.

In 2017, he upheld the Karnataka government’s ban on a book on the grounds that it outraged the religious feelings of Lord Basavanna’s followers. He had also led the three-judge bench that first suspended the sale of firecrackers in the National Capital Region in 2016.