Change of guard: Justice Tirath Singh Thakur is now the 43rd Chief Justice of India
New Delhi: Senior most Judge of the Supreme Court, Justice Tirath Singh Thakur was on Thursday sworn-in as the 43rd Chief Justice of India by the President Pranab Mukherjee at a brief function held at the Rashtrapathi Bhavan.
He succeeds Justice H.L. Dattu who demitted office on Wednesday. Among those who attended the swearing-in ceremony were the Prime Minister Narendra Modi, vice-president Hamid Ansari; outgoing CJI H.L. Dattu; several former CJIs including Justice P. Sathasivam, Kerala Governor and Justice R.M. Lodha; retired Supreme Court and High Court judges; Union ministers including Rajnath Singh, Arun Jaitley, Sushma Swaraj, members of Parliament, senior BJP leader L.k. Advani, law officers, senior lawyers and family members of Justice Thakur.
Justice Thakur became a Judge of High Court of J&K in February 1994 and transferred as Judge of the High Court of Karnataka in March, 1994. He was appointed as a permanent Judge in September, 1995.
He was transferred as a Judge of the HC of Delhi in July 2004; appointed as Acting Chief Justice of Delhi HC on September 4, 2008 and took over as Chief Justice of the HC of Punjab and Haryana on August 11, 2008. Elevated as Judge of SC in November 2009. He will have a tenure of about 13 months as the CJI and retire on January 3, 2017.
During his tenure in the last six years, Justice Thakur has rendered several landmark judgments. He ordered a CBI probe into the multi-crore Sharada scam in West Bengal and Odisha and this led to the investigating agency unearthing a huge scandal involving high profile personalities. In the BCCI case, he was instrumental in preventing ICC Chairman N. Srinivasan from contesting for the post of president of BCCI.
