Justice Krishna Murari is remembered for a Supreme Court judgment that placed personal liberty ahead of procedural shortcuts by investigating agencies.In Ritu Chhabaria v Union of India in April 2023, Justice Murari wrote that the right to default bail was a fundamental right flowing from Article 21. Investigators, he held, could not defeat it by filing an incomplete chargesheet simply to keep an accused in custody while continuing the investigation. The judgment became one of the most discussed decisions of his final months in the Supreme Court. Its application was subsequently restricted while recall proceedings were considered, but its central concern with the use of procedure to protect individual liberty marked Justice Murari’s judicial legacy. Three years after retiring from the Supreme Court on July 8, 2023, Justice Murari has taken on a very different role.He is one of five voting members of the newly created governing council of Vantara, the wildlife rescue and conservation organisation founded by Anant Ambani and financially supported by Reliance Foundation. Vantara describes the council as its “peak governing body”. Its powers extend considerably beyond an advisory role.The appointment becomes particularly significant because Justice Murari had, as a Supreme Court judge, heard cases concerning both the Greens Zoological Rescue and Rehabilitation Centre and the Radha Krishna Temple Elephant Welfare Trust.Also read: No Live Animal Imports For A Year, Says Vantara, ‘Will Focus on Conserving Species In India and Native Ranges’Vantara today identifies these organisations as components of its conservation and animal-care operations. Its website describes the elephant welfare trust as its Elephant Care Centre and places the Greens centre under the Vantara umbrella.In each of the two direct proceedings I could identify, the challenge concerning the organisation failed.That history does not establish impropriety in Murari accepting his new position. It does, however, produce a straightforward governance question: when a retired judge joins an organisation whose constituent entities benefited from decisions of benches on which he sat, what should be disclosed, and when should he step aside from decisions touching those earlier matters?The first case challenged Vantara’s animal acquisitionsThe clearest direct connection came in Kanhaiya Kumar v Central Zoo Authority in August 2022.The public interest petition sought a permanent prohibition on the Greens Zoological Rescue and Rehabilitation Centre acquiring animals either from India or abroad. It also asked the Supreme Court to constitute a Special Investigation Team to investigate the centre’s management. Greens was the second respondent. A bench of Justices Dinesh Maheshwari and Krishna Murari rejected the petition.The court accepted that Greens had been recognised by the Central Zoo Authority both as a zoo and a rescue centre. It found no legal defect in that recognition and said the permission granted to Greens and its consequential activities could not be described as illegal or unauthorised.The bench was also critical of the basis of the PIL. It found the allegations concerning lack of expertise and commercialisation uncertain and said the petitioner had relied largely on news reports without sufficient research. The petition and the demand for an SIT were dismissed. The subject of that litigation is worth noticing in the context of Justice Murari’s new role. The petitioner had specifically challenged Greens’ acquisition of animals from India and abroad.Vantara’s new governing council will now exercise oversight over animal acquisitions.Then came the elephant-transfer caseJustice Murari was involved even more directly in litigation concerning the Radha Krishna Temple Elephant Welfare Trust.In Muruly M.S. v State of Karnataka, a petitioner had challenged the transfer, sale, gift or entrustment of wild and captive elephants in Karnataka to private parties, particularly the Trust and lost his case before the Karnataka high court. A bench led by the then Chief Justice N.V. Ramana and comprising Justices Murari and Hima Kohli dismissed the petitioner’s appeal against the high court’s judgment accepting senior counsel Harish Salve’s submission that the trust would comply with all the directions of the high court and take utmost care of the rescued elephants. In August 2022, a three-judge Supreme Court bench comprising then Chief Justice Ramana and Justices Murari and Hima Kohli declined to interfere with the Karnataka high court’s decision allowing the arrangement to continue subject to welfare safeguards. The trust assured the court that it would comply with the high court’s directions and provide proper care to the rescued elephants. The special leave petition was dismissed.The matter returned to the Supreme Court in 2023, this time before Justices Murari and Ahsanuddin Amanullah.This judgment was authored by Justice Murari.The petitioner wanted clarification that the earlier orders concerning elephant transfers applied only to Karnataka. Instead, the March 3, 2023 judgment took the regulatory mechanism in the opposite direction.A high-powered committee headed by retired Supreme Court judge Justice Deepak Verma had earlier been created by the Tripura high court to oversee elephant transfers. Justice Murari’s judgment extended that committee’s jurisdiction across India.The committee was empowered to examine complaints and undertake fact-finding concerning the transfer, import into India, procurement and welfare of wild animals by rescue centres and zoos. Central and state authorities were directed to report seizures of wild animals and abandoned captive animals to it. The committee could recommend transferring animals to willing rescue centres or zoos for their care and rehabilitation.The judgment therefore had a two-sided effect.It created stronger nationwide scrutiny over wildlife transfers rather than giving the trust an unrestricted hand. At the same time, it rejected the attempt to confine the arrangement geographically and channelled future complaints through one expert committee. The judgment said this would advance animal welfare and curb repeated “frivolous PILs” in different high courts. For the trust, which had complained that repeated litigation was disrupting its work, that was plainly a favourable institutional outcome.Justice Murari now helps decide animal acquisitionsThis judicial history becomes more consequential when set against the powers of Vantara’s new council.Justice Murari is one of five voting members. The others include independent chair John E. Scanlon, a former Secretary-General of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, or CITES; conservation and wildlife-regulation specialists Craig Hoover, Subhash K. Malkhede and Greta F. Iori. Elephant specialist Dr Kushal Konwar Sarma is a non-voting ex-officio member.Vantara says members serve in their independent personal capacity and that its employees cannot be voting members.The council has overall responsibility for supervising conservation, rescue and rehabilitation, and ensuring compliance with Indian law, CITES and other international agreements. It will also shape Vantara’s direction for at least the next five years and continually review implementation of commitments Vantara made to India’s CITES Management Authority in August. Most significantly, when Scanlon’s appointment was announced in August, Vantara said the council would have “final authority over every decision to acquire an animal”. Its September announcement states more specifically that future applications to import wild animals will require the council’s prior written approval after an internal due-diligence process. Vantara has undertaken not to make an import application before June 5, 2027.Justice Murari has therefore moved from sitting judicially on challenges to animal acquisition and elephant transfers involving Vantara-linked entities to membership of a body that will scrutinise precisely such questions from inside the organisation.Does Indian law prevent this?There is no general cooling-off rule preventing a retired Supreme Court judge from accepting such a private-sector or non-profit governance role.Article 124(7) prevents a former Supreme Court judge from pleading or acting before a court or authority in India. In a December 2024 parliamentary answer on post-retirement employment, the Union Law Ministry also confirmed that the constitution prescribes no cooling-off period. Retired judges may take other assignments subject to whatever legal framework governs the particular position. The Supreme Court declined in 2023 to create a mandatory two-year cooling-off period for retired constitutional court judges. It said the decision had to be left to the judge concerned unless Parliament enacted a law. Most of India’s debate on this subject has concerned governments appointing judges to tribunals, commissions, governorships or political office. The Vantara appointment presents a less discussed variation: a private organisation appointing a former judge who had adjudicated litigation in which organisations now forming part of it were parties.Also read: Vantara Offers To Build Three Wildlife Rescue Centres in Assam, BJP Govt Says it is ‘Examining Proposal’The legal question may therefore be relatively simple. The governance question is more demanding. A well-known British precedent shows why disclosure can matter even when actual bias is neither alleged nor proved. In the litigation over the extradition of former Chilean ruler Augusto Pinochet, Amnesty International intervened before the House of Lords against Pinochet’s claim that he enjoyed immunity for alleged torture and other human-rights violations committed while he was head of state. After a 3:2 ruling against Pinochet in November 1998, it emerged that Lord Hoffmann, one of the judges in the majority, was a director and chairman of Amnesty International Charity Limited, an organisation closely associated with Amnesty International; his wife had also worked for Amnesty’s International Secretariat for many years. A differently constituted House of Lords set aside the earlier judgment in January 1999, holding that Lord Hoffmann’s institutional connection was sufficient to disqualify him even though no actual bias was alleged. Justice Murari’s position is materially different because his association with Vantara arose years after he decided the cases involving its constituent organisations. The Pinochet episode nevertheless illustrates the broader value of disclosure where a judge’s past adjudicatory role and a later institutional relationship intersect.Disclosure can resolve much of the problemA conflict of interest need not mean that a judge was biased when deciding an earlier case or that a later appointment was promised in return. The term also covers circumstances in which overlapping past and present responsibilities can reasonably require disclosure or withdrawal from a particular decision.Vantara’s September 4 announcement describes Justice Murari’s credentials and the independence of council members. It does not state whether the council has adopted a conflict-of-interest or recusal policy for members who previously dealt professionally or judicially with Vantara or its constituent entities. The release also does not disclose Justice Murari’s remuneration, the terms or length of his appointment, or how the council will vote when such a conflict arises.Those disclosures would strengthen the independence that Vantara itself says the new structure is intended to provide.A straightforward safeguard would require each council member to disclose previous professional, regulatory or judicial involvement with Vantara and related bodies. A member could then withdraw from decisions substantially connected with a matter in which that member had previously played an adjudicatory role. The organisation could publish the existence of the recusal without disclosing confidential deliberations.For Justice Murari, such a rule would be particularly relevant to future decisions involving the Greens centre, the elephant welfare trust, animal acquisitions or compliance questions substantially arising from the transactions and practices considered in the earlier litigation.This would protect both sides of the equation. It would permit Vantara to use the experience of a former Supreme Court judge while preventing his presence on the council from generating retrospective questions about judgments he delivered while holding judicial office.The larger issue therefore extends beyond Justice Murari or Vantara.Justice Murari’s Ritu Chhabaria judgment was built around the idea that procedure matters because rights can be lost when institutional safeguards become formalities. In Ritu Chhabaria v Union of India (2023), Justice Krishna Justice Murari authored the judgment defending the right to default bail as a fundamental safeguard under Article 21, holding that investigating agencies could not defeat it by filing incomplete chargesheets merely to prolong custody.His new assignment presents a different institutional setting, but a similar value, namely the need for institutional safeguards to prevent procedure from becoming an empty formality, is at stake.For a body established expressly to strengthen independent oversight, disclosure and recusal rules would allow the public to see where past judicial responsibility ends and present governance responsibility begins.That safeguard would protect Vantara’s new council as much as the reputation of the retired judge who has joined it.V. Venkatesan is contributing editor at Supreme Court Observer.