Senior lawyer KK Venugopal in an exclusive interview with NDTV said judges in the past, when Independent India’s judiciary took its first steps, were “very independent” to the point that the country’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru “made some very strong statements” against them.

Mr Venugopal, a constitutional lawyer who served as Attorney General of India from July 2017 till his retirement in September 2022, said the judges back then were so fiercely independent that Jawaharlal Nehru went to the extent of saying “they [judges] cannot sit as a fourth house of parliament.”

Born in 1931, Mr Venugopal has worked in nearly every high court in the country, except for “two or three”.

“Mohan Kumaramangalam made a scathing attack against the judiciary because land reform after land reform was struck down by the judiciary. Perhaps, they belonged to a very elitist class… Every one of those laws which had been struck down had to be reinstated by an amendment to the Constitution. That’s how Article 31A, 31B, 31C, all came into existence,” Mr Venugopal told NDTV.

“And with that, so far as the judges were concerned, they were put in their place by the executive of that time. Now, Nehru threatened to pack the coat. But that became unnecessary. Because much later… they became a political centre of the country through the public interest litigation,” Mr Venugopal said.

“There was no sphere of human activity in which the judges were not concerned. Therefore, you find strange judgements where part of governance was taken over as it were by Supreme Court judges for the last about two decades,” he said.

He said even today there are quite a few judges in the Supreme Court who are very independent.

“And today you will find that they are delivering judgments, very balanced judgments, and if necessary, fully against the government. But there is a small section, a very small section, which I think is quite favourable to the government.

“And those are the judgments which have resulted in denying bail right and left to those political or other detainees, or we know for example one or two judges, perhaps in advance know you will not be able to succeed if you are attacking the government. But otherwise, there’s a good section which is wholly independent,” Mr Venugopal said.

To a question by NDTV on who has been the real torchbearer of his legacy, Mr Venugopal took two names – Justice Rohinton Fali Nariman, and Justice KV Viswanathan.

“I think Rohinton Fali Nariman, and now Viswanathan, who was with me for a number of years. He’s going to be a Chief Justice in due course for a year or so. He, I found that in the short period of a few months, totally independent. And I think he had the advantage of sitting with Justice BR Gavai, who is equally independent and therefore I’m having very high expectations for him,” Mr Venugopal said.