Justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay on Tuesday announced that he will be joining the Bharatiya Janata Party, hours after he resigned as a judge of the Calcutta High Court, reported ANI. He is expected to be inducted into the party on Thursday.
Gangopadhyay submitted his resignation to President Droupadi Murmu, with copies sent to Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud and Chief Justice of the Calcutta High Court TS Sivagnanam, PTI reported, quoting unidentified persons.
Gangopadhyay had announced his decision to quit the judiciary and join politics on Sunday.
“I am not telling you today which party I will begin with,” he said on Sunday. “I want to first finish the little work that is still left in court.”
“We have been saying for long that [Gangopadhyay] is a political party worker,” Trinamool Congress spokesperson Debangshu Bhattacharya said on Sunday. The Congress and the BJP, on the other hand, welcomed move, opening their doors to him.
Gangopadhyay had recently accused a fellow judge in the Calcutta High Court of acting in the interest of a political party in West Bengal.
On January 24, Gangopadhyay had ordered an inquiry by the Central Bureau of Investigation into alleged irregularities in admissions to state-run medical colleges in West Bengal, even though the petitioner had not made such a demand.
Later that day, the Trinamool Congress government in the state moved a division bench of Justices Soumen Sen and Uday Kumar, which stayed Gangopadhyay’s order.
However, on the same afternoon, Gangopadhyay allowed the documents of the case to be handed over to the central law enforcement agency. On January 25, Gangopadhyay passed another directive stating that the division bench’s stay order should be ignored, even though legal precedent requires that a single judge must comply with the order of a larger bench.
Gangopadhyay also accused Sen of being an “interested party” in the case.
On January 29, the Supreme Court transferred to itself all proceedings related to the matter.
Gangopadhyay joined the Calcutta High Court as an additional judge in 2018 and was made a permanent judge in 2020.
In the past two years, he has ordered investigations by central agencies into several cases of alleged irregularities in the job recruitment process of the state education department as well as in the recruitment processes of civic bodies.
Also read: Why a Calcutta High Court judge joining BJP has raised questions about judicial independence
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