Allahabad High Court judge Justice Shekhar Kumar Yadav retired on Wednesday and said his words were twisted, after his inflammatory remarks against Muslims two years ago led to the opposition filing an impeachment memorandum against him.
In December 2024, Justice Yadav addressed a rally organized by the legal cell of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad inside the Supreme Court Bar Association headquarters in Allahabad, and made a series of inflammatory statements targeting the Muslim community and invoking majoritarian themes.
In his speech, he reportedly asserted that “India must act in accordance with the wishes of the majority”, claimed that “only a Hindu can make this country a ‘Vishwa Guru'”, and linked practices like triple talaq and halala with societal backwardness, calling for their abolition under the proposed Uniform Civil Code (UCC). Videos of the speech, which have gone viral on social media, show him using derogatory communal slurs.
He defended himself on Wednesday.
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“Those who distorted my speech were at fault, not me,” he said during the full court reference held on the occasion of his retirement in the President’s Hall of the Supreme Court. He thanked the members of the union for their support during that period, saying: “Another stage came, in which I had no fault, and in which I obtained your support, and had it not been for that, I would have been broken.”
Fifty-five opposition MPs submitted a notice of impeachment of Justice Yadav to the Rajya Sabha on December 13, 2024 over his controversial speech. HT later reported that the Supreme Court was preparing to launch an internal probe into Justice Yadav’s letter but dropped the plan after receiving a categorical letter from the Rajya Sabha Secretariat asserting exclusive jurisdiction in the matter.
After Justice Yadav’s speech sparked outrage among political, legal and civil society leaders, senior advocate Kapil Sibal led a group of 55 opposition MPs in filing a memorandum in the Rajya Sabha seeking his removal on charges of “gross violation of judicial ethics”.
Amid mounting criticism, the Supreme Court sought a report from the Chief Justice of the Allahabad High Court on December 10, 2024. A week later, on December 17, the Supreme Court bench, comprising the then Chief Justice of India Sanjeev Khanna and Justices Bhushan R Gavai, Surya Kant, Hrishikesh Roy and Abhay S Oka, summoned Justice Yadav for a closed meeting.
While Justice Yadav assured the college judges that he would apologize publicly, he failed to do so in the weeks that followed. Instead, in a January 2025 letter to the Chief Justice of the Allahabad High Court, the judge reiterated his statements, claiming they had been distorted by vested interests, and asserted that his speech reflected societal concerns.
In March 2025, the Supreme Court Department received an official letter from the Rajya Sabha Secretariat, informing it that the question of Justice Yadav’s conduct, arising out of the December 13 impeachment motion signed by 55 MPs, was already under active consideration, and that the constitutional mandate for any such action rested solely with the Chairman of the Rajya Sabha, and ultimately with Parliament and the President.
The notice of dismissal was never taken up.
