Retiring Calcutta HC judge CR Dash declares RSS affiliation
On Monday, Chitta Ranjan Dash became the second Calcutta High Court judge in the recent past to declare his right-wing political affiliation, after Abhijit Gangopadhyay.
The difference is that while the latter resigned from his position to join the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) (and become its Lok Sabha candidate from Tamluk in Bengal), Justice Dash declared his affiliation to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) after retiring, in fact, during his farewell speech. The RSS is considered the fountainhead of the BJP.
“Today, I must unfold my true self. I owe a lot to one organisation, which is a mercenary organisation. I am there from my childhood till I attained my youth. … And to the distaste of some of the persons, I must admit here that I was and I am a member of the RSS,” he said, according to Scroll.
He, however, said that he “never used the membership of my organisation for any advancement of my career, because that is against our principle”. Now, though, he is ready to go back to the RSS if it called him.
Dash, who is from Odisha, enrolled as an advocate in 1986. He joined the Odisha judicial service in 1999, becoming an additional judge of the Orissa High Court in October 2009. In June 2022, he was transferred to the Calcutta High Court.
Dash said on Monday that he does not have “any bias against any political philosophy or mechanisms” and “tried to dispense justice on two principles: one is empathy and second is law can be bent to do justice, but justice cannot be bent to suit the law”.
While Gangopadhyay had presided over key judgments that criticised the Trinamool Congress government in Bengal, Dash was not politically controversial. In fact, on Monday, he said that he had “treated everybody at par, be it a Communist person, be it a BJP or Congress or even TMC person. I do not have any bias against anybody”.
But controversy did dog him. In October last year, as a judge of the Calcutta High Court, Dash became the subject of a controversy after a bench comprising him said that adolescent girls must “control their sexual urges” so that they are not deemed a “loser” by society and adolescent boys must train themselves to respect women.
The Supreme Court (bench comprising Justices Abhay S Oka and Pankaj Mithal) in December said the observations were “unwarranted and highly objectionable” (according to LiveLaw) because they violated the rights of adolescents under Article 21 (protection of life and personal liberty) of the Constitution.
Reflecting on the Calcutta High Court in his farewell speech, Dash stated that when it was established (in 1862), it even served as the Supreme Court for the country but that the heritage has since been lost and it has lost its leadership in a pan-India context.
