Justice Gautam Patel: A Master Wordsmith Retires From Bombay High Court

Within the first few days of his appointment as a judge of the Bombay High Court in 2013, Justice Gautam Patel admittedly realised that the job is 'daunting in its width and frightening in its complexity'.

The sheer volume is terrifying, he wrote in 2017 on what it's like to move from the bar to the bench. "They keep coming at you, one case after the other. There is a relentlessness about it, and nothing you’ve been told prepares you for this volume or this range."

Justice Patel faced this challenge head on in the last 11 years.

Case in point, the 10-year-old dispute on the appointment of the leader of the Bohra community. Justice Patel started hearing the matter in 2014 and delivered the judgment just this week. Senior Counsel Janak Dwarkadas, who was involved in the case, told NDTV Profit that Justice Patel discharged this arduous task which very few judges could have undertaken.

"He marshaled voluminous documents and evidence running into more than 10,000 pages. The written submissions tendered by the parties just prior to the lunch break, which often ran to more than 100 pages, would not deter him not only from going through them in the course of his lunch break, but he would be ready with his queries soon thereafter," Dwarkadas highlighted.

What's also admirable is that despite the workload, he kept his incisive wit alive.

His orders frequently grabbed headlines and fuelled social media chatter for this reason. To cite a few, he expressed bewilderment on Kolhapur Police's arrest of a man who was drinking tea in an allegedly 'suspicious' manner.

"We were unaware that the law required anyone to give an explanation for having tea, whether in the morning, noon or night. One might take tea in a variety of ways, not all of them always elegant or delicate, some of them perhaps even noisy. But we know of no way to drink tea ‘suspiciously’."

He recently sympathised with the lawyer patrons of the Dwarka restaurant in Mumbai's Fort area, while seeking the progress of the repair work being carried out by the BMC. He asked the municipal corporation to clarify as to "when our lawyers can expect to resume their patronage of the Dwarka vegetarian restaurant?"

He was a judge with wit, humour, and intellect, said Senior Advocate Amit Desai. "He was, through his celebrated judgments, a conscience keeper of the Constitution. Be it press freedom through his “Fact Check” judgement or his protection of travel freedom, through his “Look Out Circular” judgement, he enhanced the traditions of this August High Court, Desai opined.

Senior Advocate Darius Khambata echoed a similar view.

"His judgements were a treat to read and entertaining, even if filled with home truths and legal intellect. His court was always entertaining and educational—a tour de force!"

Justice Patel’s over-a-decade-long tenure will be remembered for not just taking up challenging cases, his unparalleled gift for articulation, but also taking some bold decisions, namely upholding freedom of speech and taking a strict stand against the ills of litigation.

Justice Patel frequently spoke truth to power, both via his discourses and his judgments.

He held a 2023 amendment to the Information Technology Act as illegal, saying that it is "not just too close to, but actually takes the form of, censorship of user content". However, he could not persuade his fellow judge to resonate with his opinion and consequently, the case had to be referred to a tie-breaker judge for a final verdict.

His resistance to any assault on the freedom to speech was perhaps the loudest when he set aside National Stock Exchange's defamation case against journalists Sucheta Dalal and Debashish Basu.

"We forget that these freedoms have not come easily. They have not come cheap. They were hard won after years of sacrifice and toil and struggle. They have not been given. They have been forged. We surrender them at our peril. To suggest, as the Plaintiffs do, that because they are a much-vaunted public body, they are, only for that reason, immune from all error and wrongdoing is, I think, a grotesque over-simplification. It is fashionable these days to deride every section of the media as mere paparazzi, chasing the salacious and steamy."

Justice Patel was a strong adversary of select ills that are practised routinely in courts. During a case hearing when a petitioner tried to submit additional information on record in a sealed cover, he strongly opposed it.

"I am making it abundantly clear that at least in my Court there is no question—and there will never be a question—of anything being done ‘in sealed cover’. Anything that I can see, all parties before me are entitled to see. That is all there is to it. This is the only method that I know of to ensure an open and transparent decision-making process."

Seemingly exasperated by the delays perpetrated by a case counsel in Gillette India Ltd. versus Reckitt Benckiser (India) Pvt., Justice Patel posted the matter for hearing over three years ‘very low on the board’ as he remarked that it was evident there was no urgency at all!

He made it clear that no priority hearing will be granted unless Gillette forks out Rs 10 lakh for wasting the court’s precious time. 

Denouncing the practice of an eleventh-hour rush to the courts to stall movie releases, Justice Patel once imposed a cost of Rs 1.5 lakh on a person who claimed that the movie ‘Mohenjo-Daro' was his creative work and not the director’s.

Right at the outset of his ruling, he said: "No plaintiff may come to this Court—or, for that matter, any court—and say, 'I claim my work is infringed. I cannot and will not say precisely what work or when or how; that is something the Court must figure out. But give me a relief it must, and it matters not how it goes about doing this'."

Justice Patel added that, "when we spend time on plaintiffs who come with cases like this, we send out every conceivable wrong message to litigants who are otherwise before us, many of them old, many infirm, many aged; and many grown aged waiting for their cases to reach. We do ourselves and our system a manifest disservice by pandering to the egos and fancies of a plaintiff such as this."

As the Bombay High Court bids adieu to an eloquent judge, who repeatedly spoke against curbing dissent and warned against executive authoritarianism, Darius Khambata raises an important point—the age for retirement.

"It almost seems unfair that the mandatory retirement age for a High Court judge denies us several more years of a judge in his prime. A judge who was never afraid of speaking (or sometimes shouting!) truth to power."

His legacy, Janak Dwarkadas remarks, will be a treasure trove of decisions on diverse subjects and points of law. "He will be remembered for his quick grasp, disposal of cases with dispatch, ability to deliver orders immediately on completion of arguments, a no-nonsense approach, and guiding and painstakingly training his interns."