Justice Yashwant Varma resigned in April, handed back his official car and revived his law licence. On July 20, Parliament will still decide what to do about him.

The Question Parliament Can't Avoid on July 20 Justice Yashwant Varma is

no longer a judge. He gave up his official residence and car in April, his judicial salary stopped and he's re-enrolled with the Bar Council to practise law again. And yet, when Parliament reconvenes on July 20, it will table a report meant to answer whether he should be removed from an office he no longer holds.

The Case for Stopping Here Article 121 of the

Constitution doesn't give Parliament a general licence to discuss judicial conduct - it permits discussion only when Parliament is actually engaged in removing a judge. The 1978 Supreme Court ruling in Gopal Chandra Misra settled that a judge's resignation takes effect the moment they say so, with no formal acceptance required.

Once Varma resigned, there was no office left to remove him from and the constitutional machinery that exists solely to vacate that office lost its purpose. This isn't a technicality - it's the whole design. If Parliament can proceed anyway, what stops a future Parliament from investigating judges who retired years ago or even judges who have since died, over verdicts a later majority simply disliked?

Judicial independence depends on judges trusting that leaving office ends the process, not just delays it.

The Case for Continuing

But treating resignation as an automatic escape hatch has its own cost and it's not hypothetical - it's exactly what happened with Justices Dinakaran and Sen in 2011, both of whom resigned mid-proceedings and simply walked away from formal scrutiny.

This inquiry was constitutionally mandated and funded by taxpayers. If resignation alone can end it, any judge facing serious allegations has a built-in exit that guarantees the public never learns what the inquiry actually found - while that same judge keeps full pensionary and retirement benefits, as if nothing happened.

Legal scholars are right that this isn't really about removing Varma anymore; it's about whether India's institutions are capable of producing a public record of misconduct at all or whether resignation permanently forecloses that.

Where This Actually Lands

The distinction that resolves this is the one between removal and disclosure. Parliament's power to remove a judge genuinely ends when the office is vacated - Article 121's exception was built around a live removal and stretching it further does put judicial independence at real risk down the line.

But tabling the report as a public record, without any further parliamentary vote or debate on removal, isn't removal at all - it's simply informing citizens what a taxpayer-funded inquiry concluded. Parliament should table the report, let the Attorney General advise the House on its limits and then close the file.

What it must not do is debate or vote on removing a man from an office that no longer exists - that crosses from disclosure into exactly the kind of theatre the Cadaver Synod became.