A Whistleblower Nobody Will Judge: The Sanjiv Chaturvedi Question

In April 2026, an Indian Forest Service officer in Haldwani, Uttarakhand, sent Chief Justice of India Surya Kant a complaint of some 486 pages, sworn on affidavit, about the conduct of judges across four High Courts. Nobody acknowledged it. He sent a reminder in July and heard nothing. In August he filed an application under the Right to Information Act asking a simple question: what had happened to his complaint? On 15 September the Supreme Court’s information officer replied in a few lines. The complaint had been received on 21 April, placed before “the Competent Authority”, and “stood filed as per verbal directions”, which in the language of government files means it was closed. Then came the sentence that explains everything that follows: “Since the aforesaid letter-petition has been filed on verbal directions, no noting exists therefore.” In plain terms, his complaint was closed on a spoken instruction, nobody wrote down who gave it or why, and so there was nothing to give him.

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The IFS officer is whistleblower Sanjiv Chaturvedi. For thirteen years he has been putting questions to India’s courts, and the questions are not complicated. Will somebody investigate the corruption he exposed in Haryana, as a central inquiry, the CBI and the Central Vigilance Commission all recommended? Why did a Union Health Minister sign off on a zero in the only bad appraisal of a 23-year career? Why did the Prime Minister’s appointments committee refuse to empanel him as Joint Secretary when every other appraisal he had was “Outstanding”, and may he at least see the file? May he read the Intelligence Bureau’s report on threats to his own life? What did the CBI and the Prime Minister’s Office do with the corruption complaints he sent them? And why have seventeen judges, tribunal members and magistrates declined to hear him? He has had answers to almost none of these.

Between 2013 and 2026, seventeen judges, tribunal members and magistrates declined to hear cases involving Sanjiv Chaturvedi. The two Supreme Court judges among them, Ranjan Gogoi and Uday Umesh Lalit, both went on to become Chief Justice of India; each recused from his petition for a CBI investigation into the Haryana cases, Gogoi in 2013 and Lalit in 2016, and the petition is still pending. Four judges of the Uttarakhand High Court are on the list, one of whom has since resigned and another of whom, Justice Manoj Kumar Tiwari, became the court’s Acting Chief Justice this month. So is the then Chairman of the Central Administrative Tribunal, Justice L. Narasimha Reddy, a former Chief Justice of the Patna High Court, along with eight more tribunal members and two magistrates.

Five of these recusals came in the first nine years. Twelve came in the three and a half years since May 2023. The Probe has examined the record of all seventeen. Nine give no reason. Gogoi's bench recorded only that the matter was "not to be placed before a bench of which Hon'ble Justice Ranjan Gogoi is a member", and Lalit's that it be listed "before a Bench wherein one of us (Uday Umesh Lalit) is not a member".

Five give a reason. The chairman of the tribunal stepped aside in 2019 because Chaturvedi had filed a contempt case against him personally in the High Court. A tribunal member in Delhi stepped aside after Chaturvedi's lawyer said the member had earlier appeared against Chaturvedi in another case; the member said he had not, but that lawyers from his own family, practising from his chamber, had represented the other side, and that he might have appeared with them. A magistrate in Nainital stepped aside because she is related to the tribunal member who had started contempt proceedings against Chaturvedi, and he visits her home. Another tribunal member stepped aside because Chaturvedi had told the bench, in the hearing, that he did not trust it to be fair. And when Chaturvedi named a tribunal member in a High Court petition alleging bias, and the High Court issued him notice, the tribunal's registry recorded in July 2024 that "it would not be appropriate to list the cases of Shri Chaturvedi" before him, and asked the chairman to set up a special bench for Chaturvedi's cases alone.

Three do not fit either column. In 2018 a magistrate in Shimla, hearing a criminal defamation complaint brought against Chaturvedi by the IAS officer he had investigated at AIIMS, wrote that he did “not want to adjudicate the present matter for some personal reasons, which are being sent to the Ld. Chief Judicial Magistrate, Shimla in separate envelope”. What was in the envelope is not on the record.

And in November 2023 two tribunal members at Nainital, asked by Chaturvedi to step aside, would not say yes or no. He had argued that the bench had passed a detailed order without considering his written submissions, and that an earlier order carried remarks about his conduct which he wanted removed. They wrote eleven pages, most of them quoting a 1994 American judgment, on why a judge “has an obligation to sit on any case allocated to him or her”, said they had “no personal interest or otherwise to hear matters pertaining to present applicant”, and, because he had already gone to the High Court against one of their orders, declined to rule on his request at all. They then directed the registry to put all his cases before the tribunal’s chairman to decide who should hear them. His cases left their court. That is what a recusal is. A judge recuses by stepping away from a case, not by saying the word. Most of the seventeen orders do not use the word “recuse”, and neither Supreme Court order does. What they all have in common is that the judge who had been hearing Sanjiv Chaturvedi stopped, and his case went to someone else. The Nainital bench did exactly that.

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The Whistleblower the State Says It Wants

Who Sanjiv Chaturvedi is cannot be separated from why judges walk away from him. As a young officer in Haryana he pursued illegal construction, poaching and the diversion of forest land, and the state government pursued him back with transfers, departmental charges and criminal cases. Four times the President of India set aside orders Haryana had passed against him. A central inquiry, endorsed by the CBI and the Central Vigilance Commission, found he had been harassed for doing his job.

At AIIMS in Delhi, as Chief Vigilance Officer, he opened investigations that reached senior doctors and administrators. J.P. Nadda, then a Rajya Sabha member and later Union Health Minister, wrote four letters between January 2013 and June 2014 seeking the removal of Sanjiv Chaturvedi. In August 2014 the ministry removed him. In 2015, aged 40, he received the Ramon Magsaysay Award for his work against corruption. The same year the ministry gave him the zero appraisal. 

He is the whistleblower the Indian state says it wants but cannot afford. The Whistle Blowers Protection Act was passed by Parliament in 2014 and has never been brought into force. Without it, the courts are the only protection a whistleblower has. And it is in the same courts that Sanjiv Chaturvedi has found the doors closing, one at a time.

Doors That Do Not Reopen

Some of those doors have been locked, not closed. Four of the seventeen recusals apply to every case Sanjiv Chaturvedi will ever file. In February 2024 Justice Tiwari directed the registry “not to list the cases of Mr. Sanjiv Chaturvedi” before him. In January 2025 a tribunal member did the same. In February 2025 the two members hearing his appraisal case ordered that none of his cases be listed before either of them “in future”. The order sheet that records that direction also records how many times the case had been adjourned by then: 36.

Over the years, the pace has quickened. Six of the seventeen recusals came in 2025 alone. By March that year the Uttarakhand High Court had written itself a rule for what to do when its judges keep stepping aside. An office memorandum of 12 March lays down that a case one bench declines goes to the next bench in order of seniority; if that bench “recuses the same on being listed”, it goes to the next, “and so on”; and when the most junior bench is reached, the list starts again from the top.

What the cases have in common, Sanjiv Chaturvedi’s complaint to the Chief Justice says, is who stands on the other side of them: the “Appointment Committee of Cabinet (ACC), PMO, Union Health Minister, Chief Minister office, the Chief Secretary of a State, the Chairman and Members of CAT, and the Intelligence Bureau.” His point is a simple one. The same courts that would not decide his cases decided those of other officers against the same departments, and the difference, he argues, is who he had taken on. A recusal, in his argument, is one way of not deciding a case against the powerful.

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What Waiting Costs

Every recusal sends a case back to the registry to start again before a new bench, and for a whistleblower the delay is paid for in leave, money and years. Sanjiv Chaturvedi argues most of his cases himself these days. A Division Bench of the Uttarakhand High Court gave him permission to do so in 2021, recording, in his complaint’s words, “his difficult circumstances as a whistleblower, the persecution of counsels representing him, and his acknowledged legal competence”. He has been posted in Haldwani for most of this litigation, and his cases have been heard in Nainital, Delhi, Allahabad, Shimla and Chandigarh. Of the Chandigarh hearings he wrote that there was “no direct Train connectivity because of which considerable time and energy was wasted on each such hearing”.

In 2018 a judge of the Punjab and Haryana High Court fined him Rs 50,000 for not filing a reply he had in fact filed fourteen months earlier, and ordered the money paid to the Haryana Forest Department, the very body whose conduct towards him was before the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court set the order aside twelve days later, at the first hearing.

The money he has won he has given away. The Magsaysay prize money went to the Prime Minister’s National Relief Fund. An arbitration fee paid to him by the Chandigarh Housing Board went to the families of the Pulwama dead. Costs awarded to him by the Uttarakhand High Court went back to the Prime Minister's relief fund. In April 2026 he donated all the money payable to him as allowances to the Uttarakhand Chief Minister’s Relief Fund. After 23 years in service he owns no property.

The year 2025 shows what the waiting costs. Between July 2025 and January 2026 his eighteen cases were listed fifteen times before the Chief Justice of the Uttarakhand High Court and argued on eight of those dates. “Not a single interim, interlocutory, or final order was passed on merit in any of the remaining matters over six months, despite lengthy arguments,” he wrote. “All casual leaves of the Applicant of year 2025, were exhausted in attending aforesaid hearings and he was compelled to avail earned leave.” He called it “very distressing and emotionally shattering” to find “that even after hours of arguments, none of the cases could be finally adjudicated on merit nor even a single effective order could be passed”. Every adverse order he must appeal, he wrote, puts "pressure on this Applicant’s already over stretched resources", because an appeal "requires considerable time, energy and financial resources".

“He Will Be Cut Down to Size”

Recusals are only part of what Sanjiv Chaturvedi put before the Chief Justice. A second strand of his complaint is about what he says judges have said to him, about him, in open court. The Probe sets these out as he recorded them, on affidavit. None appears in any court order, and they remain his allegations, which The Probe has not been able to independently verify.

The most recent concerns a judge of the Uttarakhand High Court. On 10 December 2025, Chaturvedi says, he joined a hearing online to ask to be made a party to a petition by a subordinate he had charge-sheeted over the felling of 6,673 sal trees, so that he could answer the subordinate’s allegations against him of forgery and conspiracy. He says the judge called him a “habitual litigant”, “in a very rude, and offensive manner”, and when he objected, “ordered the Court staff to mute the complainant”. He says his presence that day was left out of the order sheet.

The next day, he says, his lawyer appeared for him and the judge, addressing the lawyer, said in Hindi “usko samjha do ki garmi zyada khakar koi fayda nahi hoga”, which translates roughly as “tell him that getting too hot-headed will do him no good”, and then: “He will be cut down to size.” His application was dismissed the same day. Chaturvedi wrote to the Chief Justice of India about this on 29 December 2025 and asked that the court’s recording of the hearing be preserved. The same judge had, in February 2024, directed the registry not to list Chaturvedi’s cases before him.

The complaint records other exchanges. Chaturvedi says that in September 2023 another judge of the same court “tried to unduly intimidate” him in open court by questioning his right to argue his own case, and that when Chaturvedi produced the Division Bench order permitting it, the judge rewrote what that order said in his own order sheet.

He says a third judge “made several disparaging personal remarks” against him in December 2023 while dismissing a contempt petition. He says a member of the Central Administrative Tribunal used “highly defamatory and disparaging remarks” against him in open court on 16 October 2023; Chaturvedi filed a criminal defamation complaint over it, and the tribunal then opened contempt proceedings against him on the strength of a newspaper report, without issuing notice to the newspaper. And he says that in Shimla in 2018 a judge of the Himachal Pradesh High Court “made sarcastic and disparaging personal remarks” and advised his lawyers to have him apologise to the Chief Secretary who had brought the defamation case against him. The Supreme Court set that judge’s order aside at the first hearing.

What this has done to him, he wrote, is to leave him “under constant pressure / apprehension, during his each and every Court appearances, whether Applicant may be further injured / humiliated, by way of lacerating observations by Hon’ble Judges in open Court proceedings”. He asked the Chief Justice for an inquiry, for benches that would decide his cases, and for audio-visual recording of every hearing in his cases, with a certified copy to him afterwards, “as a safeguard against misrepresentation of proceedings”. His appeal against the RTI reply argues that a complaint of 486 pages against judges which generates not one line of paper is itself a breach of a law that obliges public authorities to keep records and give reasons. The appeal is pending. 

The Law That Is Not There

Why can a judge in India step away from a case without a word? Because nothing says otherwise. There is no statute on recusal, no rule of court, no code with teeth. The Restatement of Values of Judicial Life, adopted by the Supreme Court in 1997, says a judge should not hear a matter in which a family member is “concerned”, and leaves the word undefined. The In-House Procedure, under which Sanjiv Chaturvedi’s complaint was “filed”, lets the Chief Justice close a complaint without telling the complainant why.

The Supreme Court considered the question at length in the 2015 judgment striking down the National Judicial Appointments Commission. Justice Kurian Joseph took it up in his separate opinion. A judge, he wrote, is under "the constitutional duty, as reflected in one’s oath, to be transparent and accountable, and hence, a judge is required to indicate reasons for his recusal from a particular case", at least broadly. Justice Madan Lokur, who did not go so far on reasons, wrote that "it is time that some procedural and substantive rules are framed in this regard". Eleven years on, none exist. In April, a Delhi High Court judge, refusing to recuse from the liquor policy case, wrote that recusal "has to stem from law and not narrative". For a whistleblower, there is no law for it to stem from.

Other countries have chosen differently. In the United States, federal law since 1974 has required a judge to step aside in any proceeding “in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned”, and lists the circumstances; when the Supreme Court adopted its first written code of conduct in 2023, it said justices may explain their recusals, and within months Justice Elena Kagan did so in writing.

In England, the House of Lords set aside its own Pinochet judgment in 1998 after one law lord’s undisclosed link to a party emerged. The Bangalore Principles of Judicial Conduct, endorsed by the United Nations, require a judge to step aside where “it may appear to a reasonable observer” that he cannot decide impartially, and their official commentary warns against recusing without a proper basis.

Where a written standard exists, the starting point is the same as India's, the judge's own conscience. The difference is what comes after it: a test the public can hold the judge to. Without one, recusal becomes what Sanjiv Chaturvedi's complaint calls it, "unexplained and tactical", and nobody can prove or disprove the charge, because nobody wrote anything down.

The Public Has a Right to the Reason

This is not about one officer. Whistleblowers are rare because the cost is high, and the courts are where that cost is supposed to be capped. When a whistleblower’s petition for a CBI investigation into a Chief Minister has waited since 2012, the message to the next whistleblower is plain. The system will not punish you. It will simply never get round to you.

A recusal order without reasons asks the litigant to trust. Sanjiv Chaturvedi has trusted seventeen times. His complaint says he has “neither any financial / family relation with any of the above mentioned Judges” and never “approached any of these judges in any manner”. If that is true, most of the seventeen stepped away from him for reasons he has never been told. If it is not, the record should say so. In either case the remedy is the same. A judge who steps aside should write down why and sign it.

The Supreme Court's reply to his RTI closed with a helpful suggestion. He could, "if so advised", read the In-House Procedure on the court's website. He had read it. It was the procedure he had used to file his complaint. It was also, by the reply’s own wording, the procedure under which the court had closed his complaint without telling him why.