Former acting Chief Justice of the Punjab and Haryana High Court, Justice Jagdish Singh Khehar, took oath yesterday as the new Uttarakhand Chief Justice, after Justice V.K. Gupta retired in September this year..Born on August 28, 1952, Justice Khehar graduated in science from Government College, Chandigarh in 1974 and pursued law in Punjab University, later also obtaining an LLM qualification..Designated as a Senior Counsel in 1995, he was appointed as a judge of the Punjab and Haryana High Court at Chandigarh in 1999. He delivered several significant judgments, most notably the recent full bench decision on the importance of unshorn hair for the Sikhs. The judgment, delivered in May 2009, upheld the hardline stand taken by the Shiromani Gurudwara Prabandhak Committee barring a young Sikh girl’s admission to a minority institution on the grounds that she had violated fundamental tenets of Sikhism by plucking her eyebrows.
Former acting Chief Justice of the Punjab and Haryana High Court, Justice Jagdish Singh Khehar, took oath yesterday as the new Uttarakhand Chief Justice, after Justice V.K. Gupta retired in September this year..Born on August 28, 1952, Justice Khehar graduated in science from Government College, Chandigarh in 1974 and pursued law in Punjab University, later also obtaining an LLM qualification..Designated as a Senior Counsel in 1995, he was appointed as a judge of the Punjab and Haryana High Court at Chandigarh in 1999. He delivered several significant judgments, most notably the recent full bench decision on the importance of unshorn hair for the Sikhs. The judgment, delivered in May 2009, upheld the hardline stand taken by the Shiromani Gurudwara Prabandhak Committee barring a young Sikh girl’s admission to a minority institution on the grounds that she had violated fundamental tenets of Sikhism by plucking her eyebrows.