S. Muralidhar | Humane justice
On a cold December day in 2018, a Division Bench of the Delhi High Court assembled to deliver a judgment on a mass crime that had haunted India for nearly three decades. The massacre of Sikhs — men, women and children — in the nation’s capital during the 1984 riots, which broke out following the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her two Sikh bodyguards.
In the dock was Sajjan Kumar, a Congress MP at the time of the riots. The Central Bureau of Investigation had appealed the High Court against his acquittal in the murder of five Sikhs in South West Delhi and the burning down of a gurudwara in November 1984. The judgment authored by the Bench of Justices Srinivasan Muralidhar and Vinod Goel traversed beyond the confines of a criminal appeal to state boldly that crimes against humanity enjoy political patronage and manage to evade prosecution and punishment. Decades pass by before criminals responsible for mass crimes, genocides can be made answerable. It took a page from the Charter of the Nuremberg Military Tribunal, constituted to try Nazi criminals for the extermination of Jews, to define ‘crimes against humanity’ as “murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war, or prosecutions on political, racial or religious grounds”.
Seven years later, Justice Muralidhar, lead judge on the Bench and author of the judgment, was appointed by the UN Human Rights Council as the Chair of the three-person Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem and Israel.
As the spearhead of the UN inquiry, he is expected to do on the international stage what he did best as a judge in India. To speak truth to power about human rights violations in one of the most conflict-ridden parts of the world. Gaza, where nearly 70,000 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces over the past two years, is caught in the cross-fire between Israel and Hamas.
The Commission has been tasked to investigate “all alleged violations of international humanitarian law and all alleged violations and abuses of international human rights law leading up to and since April 13, 2021, and all underlying root causes of recurrent tensions, instability and protraction of conflict, including systematic discrimination and repression based on national, ethnic, racial or religious identity”.
‘Murali’, as his friends call him, started his legal practice in Chennai in the mid 1980s. He moved to Delhi and converted his blue Maruti omni van into his chamber on the Supreme Court parking lot. As the number of his legal briefs increased, he continued to appear as an advocate for the National Human Rights Commission as well as do pro bono work for the victims of the Bhopal gas tragedy, death row convicts, and those displaced by the dams on the Narmada river.
Progressive thinking
Justice Muralidhar combined progressive thinking with fair play on the Bench after his elevation as a Delhi High Court judge. He affably refused to have a liveried usher, a remnant of the colonial age, to open doors for him or tuck him into or out of chairs. He told lawyers not to address him as ‘Mi Lord’ or ‘Your Lordship’. A simple ‘Sir’ would do very well.
Following a “midnight transfer” order from the Delhi High Court after he gave the Delhi Police a dressing down for not booking three BJP leaders for hate speech and sent the police scurrying to save people trapped in the 2020 communal riots, a cheerful Justice Muralidhar was quoted by senior advocate Sanjoy Ghose, as saying, “Whatever they take from me, they cannot take away one title, and that is, ‘a former judge of the Delhi High Court’.”
He left behind a legacy the High Court still proudly recalls. Justice Muralidhar shared the Bench with Justice A.P. Shah, braving the playful moniker ‘Gay Lords’ from colleagues, after they decriminalised homosexuality in an emotional court room in 2009, and set in process an irreversible change in the lives of a section of the population treated as criminals by law. He stood up for the rights of activist Gautam Navalakha when he questioned the legality of his arrest in the Bhima Koregaon case. The judge remained unfazed and resilient, upholding the rule of law, even when online trolls had a go at him.
A long gap of 31 years did not stop him from finding the 16 personnel of the Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC) guilty of the custodial deaths of 38 Muslim men, young and old, in the Hashimpura massacre case.
In the judgment, Justice Muralidhar spared a thought for the sheer terror the victims would have experienced as they were rounded up by the PAC and “packed into a truck and taken away” in May 1987. Five of them survived to recount the horror. The rest were believed to have been “despatched to a watery grave”. Justice Muralidhar noted in the judgment that ‘custody’ extended beyond the spatial construct of prisons and lock-ups, to being penned up in a truck unable to move, as they were herded from one place to another before being shot to death. The judge gave “the guardians of the law who gored human rights to death” a life sentence, calling it a case of “targeted killing” as all the victims were members of the Muslim community.
Justice Muralidhar retired as Chief Justice of the Orissa High Court in 2023, after guiding the judiciary through the tough days of the pandemic. He never made it to the Supreme Court Bench owing to “the closing distance” between the government and the judiciary. The government stalled for months a Supreme Court Collegium recommendation to appoint him the Chief Justice of the Madras High Court, a Chartered High Court. The Collegium had to finally withdraw the proposal.
On his retirement day, the staff and members of the Bar at the Orissa High Court lined up till the main gate in an unprecedented guard of farewell as Justice Muralidhar walked down, his smile bashful, his integrity intact, and primed for a second innings.
Published – December 07, 2025 01:25 am IST
