Umesh Chandra Banerjee
Umesh Chandra Banerjee, 2006
Judge of the Supreme Court of India
Chief Justice of the High Court of Judicature at Hyderabad
Preceded by	Prabha Shankar Mishra
Succeeded by	Manmohan Singh Liberhan
Personal details
Born	18 November 1937
Died	5 November 2012
Alma mater	University of Calcutta

Umesh Chandra Banerjee (18 November 1937 – 5 November 2012) was a Bengali Indian jurist, who served as the chief justice of the Hyderabad High Court in 1998. He had also served as a permanent judge of the Calcutta High Court and as a judge of the Supreme Court of India.^[1]

Early life

Born to Nalin Chandra Banerjee, an eminent criminal and constitutional lawyer, he graduated from the Scottish Church College of the University of Calcutta in 1961, before proceeding to study law at the Inner Temple in London, from which he graduated in December, 1964.^[2][3]

Career

He started out as a barrister at the Calcutta High Court in 1965. He was appointed a permanent judge at the Calcutta High Court in 1984. In February 1998, he was appointed Chief Justice of the Andhra Pradesh High Court. He was also appointed a judge of the Supreme Court of India in December 1998. He retired in 2002. He was one of the founder members and later president of SAARC Law.^[3][4]

Justice U.C. Banerjee, presenting the final report of enquiry on Godhra fire incident to the Chairman, Railway Board, Shri J.P. Batra, in New Delhi on March 3, 2006

In 2005, he served as chairman of the committee constituted by the Government of India on the fire in Sabarmati Express at Godhra in the state of Gujarat, that led to 59 deaths. He concluded that the fire was accidental and not started by the Muslim mob. He also came down heavily on the Railway administration for failing to conduct a statutory inquiry into the accident, which he held was in breach of the Railway Act as well as the Accident Manual of the Zonal Railway. He also pulled up authorities for not making concerted efforts to preserve clues of the incident, instead choosing to dispose of the damaged portion of the S7 coach 'as scrap'.^[5]

He served as an advisor and adjunct professor at the Rajiv Gandhi School of Intellectual Property Law of the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. He also served as a governing council member at the Scottish Church College in Calcutta, the National Law School of India University at Bangalore, and at the Nalsar University of Law in Hyderabad. He was also the founder president of the National Academy of Legal Studies and Research.^[3][6]

Later in 2006 Gujarat high court termed the appointment of the high-level Justice UC Banerjee panel that probed the Godhra train carnage as "unconstitutional, illegal and void". The formation of the commission was challenged by a victim Neelkanth Bhatia, who contended that there was already a commission probing the fire. Upholding the argument of the petitioner, the order passed by Justice DN Patel, stated: "The Railways has no authority to appoint such a committee as it was in gross violation of provisions of sections of the Indian Railways Act."^[7] It also dismissed the right of the railways to set up a high-level committee to ascertain how a fire had started on its own property, in order to make sure that it did not happen again.

Even as a special court in Ahmedabad on February 23, 2011 accepted the conspiracy theory in the burning of S7 coach of the Sabarmati Express, a theory validated by the Nanavati Commission in its final report, Banerjee told the press that he stood by his inquiry's conclusions "200%".

"I stand by my report 200% that it was an accidental fire in a coach of the Sabarmati Express at Godhra station on February 27, 2002, and I will not deviate from that," he told PTI. He said he had prepared his inquiry report after extensively going into all aspects and examining 80 witnesses before finalising his conclusion. To a question, he said his report was never guided by any political considerations and was strictly based on evidences.

References