Jasti Chelameswar

Jasti Chelameswar (born 23 June 1953) is a former judge of the Supreme Court of India.

He then studied Law and obtained a Bachelor of Laws from Andhra University, Visakhapatnam in 1976.

Chelameswar served as an additional judge at the then High Court of Andhra Pradesh.

According to an Op-Ed in The Economic Times: "Chelameswar, once a government pleader, was appointed additional judge in the Andhra Pradesh High Court in 1997. He has been chief justice of both the Gauhati and Kerala high courts where he is perceived as having done exemplary work on the green benches there. He was made a Supreme Court judge in 2011 after an unexplained delay. This denied him the chance to be chief justice of India. He has delivered several landmark judgements while in the top court."

Chelameswar and Rohinton Fali Nariman formed the two judge bench of the Supreme Court of India which struck down a controversial law which gave Indian police the power to arrest anyone accused of posting emails or other electronic messages which "causes annoyance or inconvenience".

The judges held Section 66A of the Information Technology Act, which made such offenses punishable up to three years imprisonment, to be unconstitutional.

According to Chelameswar and Nariman, several terms in the law they were striking down were "open-ended, undefined and vague" which made them nebulous in nature.

According to the judges: "What may be offensive to one may not be offensive to another. What may cause annoyance or inconvenience to one may not cause annoyance or inconvenience to another.”

In their judgement the judges clarified that a distinction needs to be made between discussion, advocacy, and incitement.

Any discussion, or advocacy of even an unpopular cause cannot be restricted, and it is only when such discussion or advocacy reaches the level of incitement whereby it causes public disorder or affects the security of the state can it be curbed.

The judgement has been welcomed for defending the Indian Constitution's ideals of tolerance and the Constitutional provisions of free speech.

It has been pointed out that the controversial law struck down by Chelameswar and Nariman had gained notoriety after many people in India started getting arrested for seemingly innocuous reasons on the grounds that they had violated the now scrapped law.

A three judge bench of the Supreme Court, composed of Chelameswar, Sharad Arvind Bobde, and Chokkalingam Nagappan, ratified an earlier order of the Supreme Court and clarified that no Indian citizen without an Aadhaar card can be deprived of basic services and government subsidies.

This ratification by the three judge bench however was made invalid by the subsequent judgements of the Supreme Court and notifications by the Government of India making Aadhar mandatory for basic services and government subsidies.

Later, he became the chief justice of the Gauhati High Court in 2007.

He previously served as the chief justice of the Kerala High Court from 2010 to 2011 and the Gauhati High Court from 2007 to 2010.

He was also one of the four judges who held a controversial press conference against Chief Justice Dipak Misra.

Chelameswar was born in Peddamuttevi village of Movva mandal, Krishna district, Andhra Pradesh, the son of Jasti Lakshminarayana, a lawyer who practised at the district court, and his wife Annapoornamma.

After completing his schooling in Machilipatnam, Chelameswar enrolled at Loyola College, Chennai and obtained a Bachelor of Science degree with physics as his major subject.

He was later transferred as the chief justice of the Kerala High Court and was elevated as a judge of the Supreme Court of India in October 2011.

In his dissenting opinion in the NJAC verdict (2015), Chelameswar had criticised the collegium system of appointing judges, which he said has become "a euphemism for nepotism" where "mediocrity or even less" is promoted and a "constitutional disorder" does not look distant.

He retired on 22 June 2018 as the second most senior supreme court judge.