Harish Salve asked why the law was not allowed to take its course after burnt cash was found at a judge’s residence, and argued that what makes a judiciary independent is character rather than constitutional provisions placing judges beyond reach. Justice Varma has denied any wrongdoing throughout, and no criminal case has ever been registered.
New Delhi: Senior Advocate Harish Salve has questioned the handling of the episode involving the discovery of burnt cash at the official residence of Justice Yashwant Varma, asking why no criminal case was registered and contending that judicial independence cannot be equated with immunity from accountability.
Salve was delivering the 6th Ram Jethmalani Memorial Lecture in Delhi. The observations set out below are his, made from a public platform rather than in court, and several of them concern matters on which opinion within the profession is divided.
What Salve said
His central argument was that the safeguards which protect judges from criminal process were designed for a different purpose altogether, namely to shield them from frivolous complaints by disgruntled litigants, and had no application to a matter brought to the notice of the Chief Justice of India through the institution’s own channels.
“When the Chief Justice of India was informed that such an incident has happened, and here is a video transcript of the institution, there was no question then of any action being taken to intimidate a judge. It was not a litigant. He should have said, let the law take its course.”
He then posed the comparison that gave his remarks their sharpest edge, asking what would have been done had the same discovery been made at the residence of a minister.
On the relationship between independence and accountability, Salve drew a distinction between institutional protection and personal integrity:
“What imparts independence to the judiciary is not Constitutional provisions which put you beyond reach. It is not constitutional provisions by which you can shield a colleague who was caught with burning cash. Independence is caused and created by your own character.”
He said the episode had exposed the judiciary’s failure to build an effective mechanism for enforcing accountability, and that public confidence could be damaged by even a small number of cases that go wrong.
“And if we have found ourselves in this situation where we are all red-faced when somebody says, what happened to that incident? It is because we have refused to accept an institution which could enforce judicial accountability.”
The safeguard he was referring to
The rule which prevented an FIR from being registered in the ordinary way is not a statutory immunity but a judicially created one. In K. Veeraswami v. Union of India, decided in 1991, the Supreme Court held that a judge of a High Court or of the Supreme Court is a public servant within the meaning of the Prevention of Corruption Act, and is therefore not beyond the reach of the criminal law. In the same breath it directed that no criminal case may be registered against a sitting judge without the prior consent of the Chief Justice of India, precisely so that the process could not be used to harass judges through motivated complaints.
That is the architecture Salve was addressing. The safeguard does not bar prosecution; it places the decision in the hands of the Chief Justice. His submission was that in a case reported through the institution’s own machinery rather than by an aggrieved litigant, the reason for the safeguard simply did not arise, and consent ought to have followed.
How the matter was in fact handled
The allegations arise from the night of March 14, 2025, when Delhi Fire Service personnel responding to a fire at the official residence of Justice Varma, then a judge of the Delhi High Court, allegedly found quantities of burnt and partially burnt currency notes in an outhouse.
The matter travelled through the institutional route rather than the criminal one. The then Chief Justice of India, Sanjiv Khanna, ordered an in-house inquiry by a three-member committee of judges and had Justice Varma repatriated to the Allahabad High Court, where he was assigned no judicial work. The committee concluded that he had tacit or active control of the storeroom in which the cash was found. On May 8, 2025, the Chief Justice forwarded its report to the President and the Prime Minister.
Justice Varma challenged those findings before the Supreme Court. In August 2025 a Bench of Justice Dipankar Datta and Justice A.G. Masih dismissed the petition as not maintainable, holding that he could not assail the committee’s findings having participated in the process.
Parliament then took over. Notices of motion for removal were signed by 145 members of the Lok Sabha and 63 of the Rajya Sabha. On August 12, 2025, Speaker Om Birla admitted the motion and constituted a three-member committee under the Judges (Inquiry) Act, 1968. A further challenge by Justice Varma, this time to the Speaker’s decision, was rejected by a Bench of Justice Dipankar Datta and Justice Satish Chandra Sharma.
Justice Varma subsequently withdrew from that inquiry, citing procedural irregularities, denial of a fair opportunity and what he described as a complete absence of evidence connecting him to the cash. He has maintained throughout that neither he nor his family had any knowledge of it, that he was not present when the fire broke out, and that the site was under the control of the police and fire officials who attended.
On April 9, 2026 he resigned to the President. The parliamentary committee nonetheless completed its work and found the charges of possessing unexplained cash, disturbing evidence and offering an evasive explanation to be proved, and the Speaker moved to table the report notwithstanding the resignation.
At no stage was an FIR registered. That is the gap Salve’s question points at.
The rest of the lecture
Salve ranged well beyond the single episode. He criticised the scale of pendency and the shortage of judges, saying that delay meant justice was often not delivered at all rather than merely not seen to be done. He called for a transparent system of judicial appointments and questioned the collegium, observing that judges appointing judges is not the norm elsewhere.
He argued that the Supreme Court had taken on matters beyond its intended constitutional role, and could not be expected to supervise the daily functioning of the lower judiciary while also deciding questions of constitutional significance. He criticised court-monitored investigations, citing the 2G and Jaitley matters as proceedings that ended in acquittals, and described the extent of judicial intervention in arbitration as an obstacle to commercial dispute resolution and foreign investment.
On the basic structure doctrine he took a position with two sides to it, saying it was necessary to protect the Constitution while cautioning against judges’ subjective views determining the limits of legislative power. He also warned against social media commentary influencing proceedings, and said judges should speak through their judgments.
Why it matters
The question Salve puts is uncomfortable because the answer is not obviously satisfactory. Every constitutional mechanism available was in fact used here. There was an in-house inquiry, a transfer, a recommendation from the Chief Justice to the President and the Prime Minister, a motion carried by members across party lines, a statutory committee, two Supreme Court judgments and a finding that the charges were proved. What did not happen was the thing that would have happened to anybody else, which is the registration of a case and an investigation.
There is a serious answer on the other side, and it deserves stating. The Veeraswami safeguard exists because a judge who rules against powerful interests is an obvious target for a criminal complaint, and once an FIR is registered the damage to a judicial career is done irrespective of the outcome. India has no shortage of examples of the criminal process being used as an instrument rather than a remedy. A rule that looks like protection from one angle looks like insulation from another, and the difficulty is that the same rule produces both.
The resignation has sharpened rather than resolved the problem. Removal by Parliament carries consequences that resignation does not, including in relation to pension, and opinion among senior counsel is divided on whether an FIR may now be registered against a person who is no longer a judge and to whom the consent requirement arguably no longer applies. That question has not been authoritatively settled.
One qualification should be kept firmly in view. An in-house committee of judges and a committee under the Judges (Inquiry) Act are disciplinary mechanisms, not criminal courts. They do not apply the criminal standard of proof, they do not afford the protections of a trial, and a finding by either is not a conviction. Justice Varma has denied the allegations from the outset and has never been tried on them. Whatever view one takes of Salve’s argument, that remains the position.
Speaker: Senior Advocate Harish Salve, at the 6th Ram Jethmalani Memorial Lecture, New Delhi, September 14, 2026
Subject: Handling of the cash discovery at the official residence of Justice Yashwant Varma, then a judge of the Delhi High Court, on March 14, 2025
Relevant authority: K. Veeraswami v. Union of India (1991), requiring the prior consent of the Chief Justice of India before registration of a criminal case against a sitting judge
Status: In-house committee and Judges (Inquiry) Act committee findings adverse to Justice Varma. He denies the allegations. He resigned on April 9, 2026. No FIR has been registered and no criminal charge has been framed.