Justice Surya Kant was sworn in as the 53rd Chief Justice of India on November 24, 2025.
| Photo Credit: PTI
Justice Surya Kant took oath as the 53rd Chief Justice of India on Monday (November 24, 2025). He took his oath in Hindi.
Justice Surya Kant will remain in the post for nearly 15 months. He will demit office on February 9, 2027 on attaining the age of 65 years.
On November 22, 2025, Justice Surya Kant said one of the biggest challenges in his tenure as top judge would be to bring 90,000 pending cases in the Supreme Court down to a “manageable” number.
Born on February 10, 1962 in Hisar district of Haryana to a middle-class family, Justice Kant went from being a small-town lawyer to the country’s highest judicial office, where he has been part of several verdicts and orders of national importance and constitutional matters. He also has the distinction of standing ‘first class first’ in his Master’s degree in law in 2011 from Kurukshetra University.
Justice Kant had been the subject of controversy over a letter written by Justice (now retired) A.K. Goel to then Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra. Justice Goel, then an apex court judge, had disagreed with a proposal to elevate Justice Kant as Chief Justice of the Himachal Pradesh High Court. However, the Misra Collegium, in a notification dated October 3, 2018, went ahead with Justice Kant’s elevation.
Justice Kant, who penned several notable judgments in the Punjab and Haryana HC, was appointed the Chief Justice of Himachal Pradesh HC on October 5, 2018.
His tenure as an Supreme Court judge is marked by verdicts on the abrogation of Article 370, free speech and citizenship rights.
He was part of the bench that kept the colonial-era sedition law in abeyance, directing that no new FIRs be registered under it until a government review.
Justice Kant also nudged the Election Commission to disclose the details of 65 lakh voters excluded from the draft electoral rolls in Bihar while hearing a batch of petitions challenging the poll panel’s decision to undertake Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the voters list in the poll-bound State.
He is also credited with directing that one-third of seats in bar associations, including the Supreme Court Bar Association, be reserved for women.
Justice Kant was part of the bench that appointed a five-member committee headed by former top court judge Justice Indu Malhotra to probe the security breach during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Punjab in 2022, saying such matters required “a judicially trained mind”.
He also upheld the One Rank-One Pension scheme for defence forces, calling it constitutionally valid, and continues to hear petitions of women officers in the armed forces seeking parity in permanent commission.
Justice Kant was on the seven-judge bench that overruled the 1967 Aligarh Muslim University judgment, opening the way for reconsideration of the institution’s minority status.
He was also part of the bench which heard the Pegasus spyware case and which appointed a panel of cyber experts to probe allegations of unlawful surveillance, famously stating that the state cannot get a “free pass under the guise of national security”.
(With inputs from PTI)
Published – November 24, 2025 10:45 am IST
