Instances when SC held special sittings on non-working days

The past few years have witnessed several instances when the Supreme Court constituted special benches to hear during the weekend cases dealing with matters related to personal liberty, political crisis, pollution in the national capital and even allegation of sexual harassment against a sitting Chief Justice of India.

The top court on Saturday held a special sitting after taking cognisance of an order passed by a single-judge bench of the Calcutta High Court that termed as ”illegal” a division bench order in a case of alleged irregularities in admission of MBBS students in West Bengal’s state-run medical colleges and hospitals.

A five-judge bench comprising Chief Justice D Y Chandrachud and justices Sanjiv Khanna, B R Gavai, Surya Kant and Aniruddha Bose stayed all proceedings pending before the Calcutta High Court and issued notice to the West Bengal government and the original petitioner in the case.

This was one of the many instances when the apex court has held a special sitting on a non-working day.

On July 1 last year, the Supreme Court constituted two separate benches, one after the other, to hear a plea by activist Teesta Setalvad seeking interim protection from arrest in a case of alleged fabrication of evidence to frame innocent people in 2002 post-Godhra riot cases.

In a special late-night hearing on a Saturday, a bench of Justices B R Gavai, A S Bopanna and Dipankar Datta questioned the denial of time to Setalvad to appeal against the high court order, saying even an ordinary criminal is entitled to some form of interim relief.

The three-judge bench heard the matter in a special sitting after a two-judge vacation bench differed on granting Setalvad interim protection from arrest.

In 2023, the apex court took suo motu (on its own) cognisance and stayed on a Saturday an Allahabad High Court order asking the head of the Department of Astrology, Lucknow University, to decide whether a woman, an alleged rape victim, is ‘Manglik’ or not. In Indian astrological tradition, a marriage between a person with Manglik ‘dosha’ and another who doesn’t have such ‘dosha’ (defect or imbalance caused by planetary positions) is considered inauspicious. A Special Bench of justices M R Shah (since retired) and Bela M Trivedi had assembled on October 15, 2022, a Saturday, to suspend a Bombay High Court decision to discharge ex-Delhi University professor G N Saibaba in a case linking him to banned Maoist rebels.

A bench headed by the then Chief Justice of India, N V Ramana, had assembled on November 13, 2021, also a Saturday, to direct the Centre and the Delhi government to take emergency measures, even proposing a two-day lockdown, to bring the air quality in the capital back to normal.

Apex court judges have also held sittings on Sundays. A three-judge bench heard an urgent petition filed by the Congress, Nationalist Congress Party and Shiv Sena against the swearing-in of BJP leader Devendra Fadnavis as the Maharashtra chief minister on November 24, 2019, a Sunday.

The then chief justice of India, Ranjan Gogoi, held a special hearing on April 20, 2019 to probe a larger conspiracy behind sexual harassment allegations against himself.

The hearing of the case, titled as a matter of ”great public importance touching upon the independence of the judiciary”, was held after stories were published on some news portals about sexual harassment allegations levelled by a former employee of the apex court against the CJI.

In 2020, the top court heard on a Sunday a plea by prominent journalist, the late Vinod Dua, seeking quashing of a sedition case against him.