- Monday, May 05, 2025
By: Shubham Ghosh
THE controversy around former Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Nupur Sharma has taken a new twist with India’s Supreme Court now coming under the scanner over its scathing observations over her viewpoints that saw a massive backlash both in India and abroad.
As many as 15 former judges, 77 former bureaucrats and 25 retired army officers have slammed the apex court’s recent remarks on Sharma that included a direct accusation of being “single-handedly responsible for what is happening in the country”.
The critics wrote an open letter on the two-judge bench’s observation on Sharma’s remarks and in it, they said by accusing Sharma the way it did, the Supreme Court’s observation was a “virtual exoneration of the dastardliest beheading at Udaipur”, Indian news channel NDTV reported.
A Hindu tailor named Kanhaiya Lal was brutally murdered by two self-radicalised Muslim men in a busy market area in broad daylight in Udaipur in the north-western Indian state of Rajasthan on June 28 over his social media posts backing Sharma. A week before that incident, another Hindu man – a chemist in Amravati in the western state of Maharashtra – was stabbed to death allegedly for supporting Sharma.
Sharma, who was suspended from the post of spokesperson by the BJP in the wake of the controversy which even saw diplomatic row with a number of Muslim nations, had moved the Supreme Court asking the police complaints registered against her across the country to be clubbed together and transferred to Delhi. The court refused her plea and slammed her instead.
The top court’s judges said Sharma’s “loose tongue” had “set the entire country on fire”, and that her comments were either aimed at cheap publicity, political agenda or some “nefarious” activities.
The letter, issued on Tuesday (5), said those “unfortunate and unprecedented comments” from the bench of Justice Surya Kant and Justice JB Pardiwala “are not in sync with judicial ethos”.
“Such outrageous transgressions are without parallel in the annals of judiciary.”
It also said the observations had “no connect” with the issue raised in her petition.
The letter also said that as Sharma was “denied access to judiciary”, there was “an outrage on the Preamble, spirit and essence of the Constitution of India”.
On Friday (1), when Sharma’s lawyer said she had been getting threats and it would not be safe for her to travel to other parts of the country for probe, Supreme Court Justice Kant had said, “She faces threats or she has become a security threat?… It is shameful. She should apologise to the whole country.”
The court had also said that Sharma’s remarks “show her obstinate and arrogant character”.
“What if she is the spokesperson of a party? She thinks she has a back-up of power and can make any statement without respect to the law of the land,” Justice Kant had said.
The letter against the court’s observations said, “One fails to understand why Nupur’s case is treated at a different pedestal… Such an approach of the Supreme Court deserves no applause and impacts the very sanctity and honour of the highest court.”
The 117 signatories to the letter include former Bombay High Court Chief Justice Kshitij Vyas, former Gujarat High Court judge SM Soni, former Indian Administrative Service officers RS Gopalan and S Krishna Kumar, former top police officers SP Vaid and PC Dogra, Lt General VK Chaturvedi (retired), among others.
Justice Pardiwala had earlier reacted to social media attacks against him and Justice Kant over the observations on Sharma’s remarks.
“Personal attacks on judges for their judgements lead to a dangerous scenario,” he had said.
