New Delhi: Having held the helm of affairs in Supreme Court for a little over a year, Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi, on his last working day on Friday, said he chose to belong to the institution whose strength lay in public confidence and trust.
Gogoi, who presided over the Supreme Court bench for the last time on Friday, etched his name in the annals of history this week by giving some of the most important verdicts on politically sensitive issues in recent times — primarily, the Ayodhya land dispute case.
In a statement issued in response to requests from mediapersons for interviews, Justice Gogoi said, “As a public functionary, entrusted with onerous constitutional duties to discharge, the idea of courting the press never endeared itself as a choice in the interest of my institution. I chose to belong to an institution whose strength lay in public confidence and trust, earned not through good press, but through our work as judges on the bench”, said Gogoi.
Appreciating the media for displaying “maturity and character”, and exercising “exceptional discretion” to prevent “canard and falsehood” from clogging the news space, the CJI said, “To me, those were the times when the stellar role of journalists came to the fore.”
