C S Karnan, a former High Court judge who accused colleagues of caste discrimination and was sentenced to six months in prison for criminal contempt while still on the bench, died in Chennai on Friday. He was 71.Justice Karnan’s confrontations with fellow judges unfolded as India’s judiciary faced questions on how it chose its members, how it assessed merit, and how much of that process it was willing to explain. He brought caste into those disputes with an insistence that drew attention to who sat on the bench and how Dalit lawyers and judges were treated.His own conduct came under scrutiny, too, first from colleagues who accused him of indiscipline and later from lawyers who complained that his public statements threatened and demeaned women.From a Tamil Nadu village to High CourtBorn on June 12, 1955, Karnan came from Karnatham, a village in Tamil Nadu’s Cuddalore district. He enrolled as an advocate in April 1984 and practised at the Madras High Court and in Chennai’s civil and family courts, handling civil, criminal, constitutional and service matters.In 2009, the Madras High Court’s collegium, led by Chief Justice A K Ganguly, recommended him for appointment as an additional judge. The Supreme Court’s collegium, headed by Chief Justice K G Balakrishnan, accepted the recommendation. The selection process that brought him to the bench would become one of the subjects of his most public disputes.First brush with controversyIn January 2014, as a Madras High Court Bench heard a public interest petition alleging partisanship in the selection of additional judges, Justice Karnan walked into the courtroom in plain clothes. He interrupted a lawyer’s argument and told the judges that the selection was unfair, a senior court official recalled in May 2015. He said he was part of the judiciary and would file an affidavit. He did, and it was dismissed. That evening, the chief justice, R K Agrawal, convened a meeting of the full court to discuss his conduct.At a news conference in his chambers, Justice Karnan described what he said were humiliations he had endured as a Dalit judge. At one meeting, he said, a colleague sitting cross-legged beside him deliberately touched him with a shoe, then apologised. Two other judges, he recalled, watched and smiled. A lawyer close to him said in May 2015 that Justice Karnan had kept quiet about some incidents because he feared bringing the court into disrepute. A senior judge, speaking that same month, recalled complaints of corruption over bail decisions by Justice Karnan’s vacation bench in 2011.Story continues below this adBy May 2015, a dispute with another chief justice, Sanjay Kishan Kaul, had reached the Supreme Court. Justice Karnan had challenged the composition of a panel that would interview candidates for civil judgeships, saying it should include a Muslim judge and a Christian judge. He stayed the administrative order constituting the panel. A division bench stayed his order, and he subsequently threatened contempt proceedings against Chief Justice Kaul. The High Court’s registrar general asked the Supreme Court to intervene.Justice Karnan was transferred to the Calcutta High Court in March 2016. In February 2017, seven Supreme Court judges led by then Chief Justice J S Khehar began contempt proceedings on their own motion over allegations against other judges that the court deemed baseless. They barred Justice Karnan from judicial and administrative work.When he ‘sentenced’ the CJIOn May 1, the Supreme Court ordered a medical board to assess whether Justice Karnan was fit to defend himself. He declined the examination and submitted a written declaration on May 4 saying he was of stable mind. On May 8, invoking the law against atrocities on Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, he issued a purported order sentencing Chief Justice Khehar and seven other Supreme Court judges to five years of rigorous imprisonment.The next day, the Supreme Court found him guilty of criminal contempt and sentenced him to six months in prison. The court said his conduct had damaged the reputations of individual judges and the judiciary as a whole. It also barred the media from reporting his subsequent statements.Story continues below this adJustice Karnan eluded police and retired on his 62nd birthday — June 12, 2017. Police arrested him near Coimbatore eight days later. That November, his aide and legal adviser W Peter Ramesh Kumar said after visiting him in prison that the retired judge planned to publish 22 of his orders alongside an autobiography. In 2018, Justice Karnan founded the Anti Corruption Dynamic Party.A complicated legacyJustice Karnan was arrested again in Chennai on December 2, 2020, after videos circulated in which, according to the police account, he made obscene remarks and threatened sexual violence against people associated with the judiciary. A senior lawyer’s complaint to the CJI described his remarks as an affront to the dignity of women. The Madras High Court granted him bail in March 2021 after he submitted two affidavits offering unconditional apologies and promising to refrain from repeating the conduct. The court made bail conditional on that undertaking.Karnan’s place in the judiciary was complicated. He alleged caste discrimination within a system whose powers he himself exercised, faced allegations of corruption over his own bail decisions, and was embraced by caste groups that saw in his defiance a cause of their own.