Make way for the new thalaiva! Indu Malhotra becomes the first female Supreme Court judge

New Delhi, April 27: Creating history in the judiciary, make way for the new Supreme Court Judge Indu Malhotra. Sworn in as the first woman to be elevated to the rank of a judge in the apex court directly from the Bar, Indu Malhotra was unanimously recommended by the powerful Collegium headed by CJI Dipak Misra along with the Chief Justice of Uttarakhand KM Joseph on January 10 earlier this year.

 

Hailing from a lawyer’s family, Indu Malhotra was born on March 14, 1956. She joined the legal profession in her late 20s; before that, she was a Delhi University lecturer in the morning and a law student in the evening. She had a short stint as a teacher at Miranda House College and Vivekananda College in Delhi.

Most of her litigation career, spanning over three decades, has been spent at the Supreme Court. She enrolled herself as a lawyer in 1983 in the Bar Council of Delhi. In 1988, she qualified as an Advocate-on-Record (AoR) in the Supreme Court.

She has represented various statutory bodies such as the Securities Exchange Board of India, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research and the Indian Council for Agricultural Research.

Until now, Justice R. Banumathi was the lone woman judge in the top court with a strength of 25 judges. Amid a call for greater gender diversity in the Supreme Court, Ms. Malhotra’s name was cleared unanimously by the Collegium, comprising Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra and Justices J. Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, Madan B. Lokur and Kurian Joseph.

Ms. Malhotra’s direct move from Bar to Bench is seen as breaking a major glass ceiling by many in the legal fraternity, as it has cleared the decks for more woman advocates to get directly nominated as judges of the Supreme Court. All the six previous woman judges of the court were elevated from the High Court, the first being Justice M. Fathima Beevi in 1989.