The Inconsistencies in Justice Bela Trivedi’s Court

Justice Bela Trivedi did make room in her court for the ideals of liberty. Only, selectively.

Justice Trivedi was the first woman judge of the Gujarat High Court to be elevated to the Supreme Court.

(Photo: Kamran Akhter/The Quint)

Ordinarily, Justice Bela Trivedi would have retired today, 9 June.

But Justice Trivedi was no ordinary judge. One of the only eleven women to have ever been a judge at the Supreme Court of India, Bela Trivedi made both, history and headlines. A lot of it, however, was controversial.

Let’s start at the beginning. According to SCC Online, Justice Trivedi was the first woman judge of the Gujarat High Court to be elevated to the Supreme Court. She is also among a handful of judges who have risen steadily through the ranks — from subordinate judiciary to the top-most court of the country.

An Uncommon Rise to the Top Court

It is a different matter that when Justice Trivedi’s name came up as part of a nine-judge batch for appointment in 2021, it was at the expense of more senior judges who had supposedly been in waiting.

“The list of SC judges also left many surprised as most of the elevated judges are relatively junior to some chief justices of high courts,” The Print reported at the time. Among those who were allegedly “excluded from the reckoning” while Justice Trivedi and others were picked, were Justices Akil Kureshi and S Muralidhar.

The collegium had reportedly been in an impasse over Kureshi’s appointment to the top court for several months, before his name was finally excluded and Trivedi's was added. Justice Kureshi was, at the time, serving as Chief Justice of the Tripura High Court. Notably as a judge in the Gujarat High Court in 2010, he had sent current Union Home Minister Amit Shah to police custody for his alleged involvement in the Sohrabuddin Sheikh encounter case. (Shah was discharged in 2014).

The Print, meanwhile cited sources in the Supreme Court as saying that “Justice Trivedi (then a Gujarat High Court judge) got preference over Justice Kureshi due to her wide experience as a judge.”

In 1995, Trivedi was appointed as a Judge in the City Civil and Sessions Court at Ahmedabad. In the years prior to her appointment as a High Court judge, she was also deputed as Law Secretary to the Gujarat state government under then-CM Narendra Modi (2004–06), as Registrar (Vigilance), and as a CBI special court judge.

Thus, her realm of experiences stretched far and wide. However, it did not explain either her strained relationship with the bar (the Supreme Court Bar Association refused her a farewell) or her controversial judicial positions, which reflected a departure from the top court’s general emphasis on the the value of civil liberties.

What the Legal Experts are Saying

Considering the fact that Trivedi made the unordinary decision of demitting office weeks before her official retirement date—and a week before the court closed for vacation—much has been said about her already.

A National Herald article talks about the “Controversial end to (her) controversial tenure”, marked by the Supreme Court Bar Association's refusal to host the customary farewell for her. A Scroll piece has also already called her a “deeply unpopular judge." And lawyers have lamented all the times she was “rude” and punishment-oriented. Mostly, however, legal experts have talked about her propensity to deny liberty and how she “went against the oft-repeated adage by the Supreme Court that “bail is the rule, jail is the exception”. 

In a private conversation, one lawyer pointed out that for Justice Trivedi, bail, in fact, was the exception.

But, I want to take this moment—this ordinary date of her retirement, as stated on the Supreme Court website—to reflect on the exceptions to her exception. Because, the truth is not that Justice Trivedi was consistently conservative and anti-liberty. She did allow relief in some matters. It is in these inconsistencies, however, that a deeper grouse becomes apparent.

A Record Riddled with Contradictions

Justice Trivedi cancelled GN Saibaba’s discharge from the Bombay High Court, kept Mahesh Raut indefinitely in jail despite a bail order from the Bombay High Court, dismissed bail pleas of activists Sharjeel Imam and Gulfisha Fatima, and denied bail to Aam Aadmi Party’s (AAP) Satyendar Jain and Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam leader V Senthil Balaji, among several others.

Umar Khalid’s case was reportedly listed before Justice Trivedi at least a dozen times before he finally withdrew his application. She also reversed a High Court order granting bail to to Kanhaiya Prasad, the

son of JD(U) MLC Radha Charan Sah and asked him to return to jail—another uncommon choice as the apex court usually, barring exceptional circumstances, allows High Court orders that have already resulted in liberty. 

It is still a misconstruction to say that this was Justice Trivedi’s unwavering stand across the board. She was frequently strict and conservative. But not without exception. In fact, going by Kapil Sibal’s recollection, if Justice Trivedi suggested that she was not one to “have some empathy” she too may have made an incorrect self-assessment.

For Justice Trivedi did show empathy, and made room in her court for the ideals of liberty. Only, under select circumstances. In January 2024, for instance, she granted protection from arrest to Nisith Pramanik, BJP leader and former minister, in connection with an attempt to murder case. This order came after the High Court had refused to grant him the same relief and adjourned the matter to a later date.

A bench of Justices Trivedi and Pankaj Mitthal also, according to Livelaw, upheld the acquittal of Union Minister of State for Home, Ajay Mishra Teni in the murder case of student-leader Prabhat Gupta. “We are not inclined to interfere with the concurrent findings of facts recorded…” the Justice Trivedi-led bench had said in this case.

This is a stark contrast from the manner in which she had sat especially on a Saturday in 2022, with Justice MR Shah, and cancelled GN Saibaba’s discharge, despite the Bombay High Court's detailed findings. At the time, legal experts had noted that the bench did not say that the High Court’s conclusion was prima facie wrong.

“Unless a superior court finds that the lower court’s order is unsustainable, you cannot stay the order. Not just because the court wants to look into the very fine points of law,” Senior Advocate Colin Gonsalves had told The Quint at the time. The top court had still let the wheelchair-bound professor languish in jail for another 17 months, until the Bombay High Court acquitted him and ordered his release, once again. Seven months later, Saibaba, whose ill-health had worsened in jail, passed away from post-surgery complications.

On the other hand, in August 2024, a bench led by Justice Trivedi rejected two petitions seeking cancellation of bail granted to a man accused of plotting the assassination of journalist Gauri Lankesh. “We are not inclined to interfere with the impugned orders passed by the High Court,” the Supreme Court reportedly said in this matter. It also noted that accused Mohan Nayak had cooperated with the trial and not sought unnecessary adjournments.

But perhaps the most telling inconsistency in Justice Trivedi’s judicial pronouncements was in the manner with which she dealt with bail cases, sought on similar grounds.

In November 2023, Justice Trivedi refused to grant bail to DMK leader Senthil Balaji on medical grounds. When Balaji’s counsel brought up his chronic lacunar infarction, Justice Trivedi, as per Livelaw, remarked: "I checked on Google. It says that it can be cured by medication. There's nothing as such that's serious, otherwise, we would have seriously considered it." When the counsel said: “The man is sick, he has had a bypass..." Justice Trivedi reportedy countered with: "Today, bypass is like getting an appendix removed”.

In March 2024, she cancelled the interim bail granted to AAP’s Satyendar Jain on grounds of ill-health, and asked him to surrender. It was not before October that year that Jain was finally allowed bail by a lower court, which noted the length of time he had already spent behind bars.

But Justice Trivedi did not refuse medical bail to everybody. For instance, former Maharashtra minister Nawab Malik was allowed medical bail, even when Balaji and Jain were not. Incidentally, all three had been booked for separate money laundering related offences.

The Cost of Inconsistency

The apex court is not expected to consistently speak in the same tune. Each case is defined by its unique circumstances as well as the jurisprudential philosophy of the judge it is listed before.

But values such as liberty and equality are emphasised for a purpose. Constitutional mandates are non-negotiable for a reason. There is a logic in allowing legal precedent to define the outcome of future cases. The role of a legal commentator, therefore, is to witness the glaring inconsistencies in every court and every judge.

The only point of this exercise, is to note that Justice Trivedi, strict for the most part, was not so with everybody. What motivated the diversity in her own views—contradictory approaches under similar circumstances—is incumbent on the legal historians of the future to assess.

On the date at which she would have ordinarily retired, I conclude with an ordinary question that all legal analysts ought to ask for the sake of equitable justice: The apex court has held that “liberty is not a gift for the few”, so why did Justice Trivedi reserve it only for some?

(Mekhala Saran is an independent journalist and researcher. She was formerly The Quint’s principal legal correspondent. This is an opinion piece. The views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)