“Many of us still think about him as ‘Madan’ and not ‘Justice Lokur’”

Sanjay Hegde

I first came to know Justice Madan Lokur when I started as a junior in the office of Attorney General, G Ramaswamy.

Justice Lokur, who was an advocate then, had been appointed Central government Standing Counsel by Subramanian Swamy, who was then the Law Minister.

Lokur J. used to come to brief Mr. Ramaswamy frequently and that is how I came into contact with him.

He was assisting Mr. Ramaswamy in the Justice Verma Commission, which was inquiring into Rajiv Gandhi assassination. Therefore, he used to be at 10, Motilal Nehru Marg, which is the Attorney General’s bungalow. It is next to the Taj Mansingh hotel.

I was from Bombay and was new to the city of Delhi and its ways. I relied on public transport those days, and the DTC had particularly old, nasty buses.

Justice Lokur was a kind man who would drop me from 10, Motilal Nehru Marg to near Pragati Maidan, from where I could hop on a bus to reach my house in Mayur Vihar.

I did not realise it then, but he lived in Vasant Kunj, which was in the opposite direction. So, he was actually going out of his way to help a young junior reach home early.

He never lost that trait of being unassuming and kind. Those qualities remained in him till his last working day.

Not about I, Me, Myself

Even his farewell speech was noteworthy in that it wasn’t about “I”, “Me”, “Myself”. It was all about thanking various people who had played a role in shaping his career. He thanked all people with whom he had worked as a junior, including Mr. VN Ganpule, whom many people don’t know these days.

Mr. Ganpule, who then was an Advocate-on-Record, had a huge practice in Supreme Court. He was also Senior to Justice AM Khanwilkar.

The Supreme Court AoR tradition of playing crucial roles in cases without necessarily having a star role also shaped some part of Justice Lokur’s judicial life.

As a judge

He would have been a good Chief Justice of India if he had been elevated on time. But even though he was not so appointed, he never gave vent to any disappointment. Often, we at the Bar perceive that the incumbents of Court 1 and Court 2 are at loggerheads. However, there was not a hint of that at all in the few months that Justice Lokur and Justice Gogoi were in Courts 1 and 2. Justice Gogoi also paid a very heartfelt, emotional tribute to Justice Lokur.

As a judge, Justice Lokur had trained himself to be a patient listener. He would listen to lawyers attentively. But what I could sense was that somewhere in the middle of the hearing, he would make up his mind. He would not necessarily give a hint about that to the people who argue. Thus, to say that he was open till the last would not be correct according to me.

But he never demeaned anyone. He never looked down upon anyone. He could get irritated. Sometimes his irritation and anger were palpable, but it never got personal.

Never judged a lawyer by the length of his car

Later, our paths diverted because Justice Lokur was mostly in the Delhi High Court while I was mostly in the Supreme Court. But he was very informal even when he was an Additional Solicitor General.

My wife and I accidently ran into his wife and him at Sarojini Nagar market. He never had any airs about him. He never fell for the Delhi tribe where a lawyer is judged by the length of his car and not by the strength of his argument.

Lokur J. had a steady practice and had a large volume of government work too. He was often seen at the Paan shop in the Delhi High Court and I am told that the vendors still have very fond memories of him.

Madan, and not Justice Lokur

To be candid, many of us still think of him as Madan rather than as Justice Lokur. He was a man who never let judgeship get to him.

Though he personally did not know poverty or deprivation, he felt for it greatly. In social interest matters, or cases relating to prisoners’ rights or the death sentence, he never forgot that there was a human being at the end of the process.

Very often, judges, bureaucrats, and administrators all fall into the same trap of dealing with such matters merely as files. They tend to distance themselves from the human consequences of their judgments or decisions. That never happened with Justice Lokur.

He worked very hard not only to streamline the administrative processes through computerisation, but also to set right and give a firm direction to the law.

One example is the judgment in Shankar Kisanrao Khade v. State of Maharashtra relating to death penalty, where he emphasised that it is not the crime alone which should be in the “rarest of rare” category, but the “criminal” as well.

Justice Madan Lokur never lost his humanity. He was a man with a heart.

Sanjay Hegde is a Senior Advocate at the Supreme Court of India.