New Delhi: Former Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud “did not live up to my expectations of him”, Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul said to Karan Thapar in an interview for The Wire on Saturday (October 24). A former judge of the Supreme Court who was the senior most puisne judge during the tenure of CJI Chandrachud, who recently published a memoir, titled Without Fear or Favour, Justice Kaul held back little as he revealed several critical details from the time.In the book, Justice Kaul has said that as the CJI, at one time, D.Y. Chandrachud sought the government’s “nod” before the Supreme Court collegium had even met and, another time, he even voiced its “bizarre” query on the caste of a minority-faith judge candidate.When asked about how the two top judges were frequently at odds with each other, Justice Kaul noted that the expectations from the CJI, who he referred to as ‘Dhan’, were much higher.“Dhan was somebody from whom there was a lot of expectation. At the beginning of his tenure, I had told him I would help him out. The role of the second judge is not to pull the leg of the CJI, it is to support. But maybe we were different people in our thinking processes,” he said in the interview.He went on to express his disapproval of the former CJI’s handling of government decisions. “I felt that in dealing with the government, especially in judicial appointments, we should have been more firm,” he said.In the interview, he also elaborated on his mention of a Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) case in the book, that was attempted to be taken away from the bench he presided over, and which he wrote, “drove a wedge between the chief justice and me”.While sitting on a three-judge bench, he said it “disturbed” him when a colleague told him that it had gone before another bench. “I did talk to the chief justice and he said some judge had passed an order for consolidation of all the matters before herself and her bench, to which I said it can’t have been done without the chief justice’s concurrence.”In his memoir, Justice Kaul reveals that the matter was eventually put before a three-judge bench that included him. However, in the middle of the hearing, in a conversation with the CJI, and in presence of Justice Sanjiv Khanna, he was told that “caution would be the wiser course” and that he should “take the middle path”.On the striking down of the National Judicial Appointments Commission (NJAC) in 2015, he writes that he felt it “should have been given a chance to work”. “There is a difference between consultation and what I came to regard as pre-approval – seeking the Government’s nod before the collegium had even formally deliberated. That sends the wrong signal. Any political class will always assert itself if you give them a wedge in the door. This is not in any sense a partisan matter but simply a question of the inevitable dynamics of power,” he writes.When Chandrachud became a member of the Collegium in June 2022, he goes on to say, he suggested the two “face the Government together – a good-cop bad cop arrangement, if one likes since I was not the chief justice and could afford to be the firmer of the two.”The government, he notes, “was not averse to it; it had taken my measure and knew I was neither a walkover nor a man to be ignored.” However, “Dhananjay, with a few exceptions, preferred to handle that relationship all on his own”.In the interview, Justice Kaul said that the Collegium had agreed on five names of judicial appointment, but the CJI wanted a sixth name, propped up at the last minute, which was not acceptable to Justice Kaul or the other members of the Collegium.“Maybe he had already taken some kind of approval [from the government] for the other names, including the sixth name,” Justice Kaul said.“This has unfortunately become a practice of names being discussed, and some kind of previous discussion with the government. That used to happen; it has been happening, I think before [CJI Chandrachud] and after. That is why it troubles me,” he added.