A question now sits on the Lok Sabha Speaker’s desk. Should the inquiry committee that was examining the allegations against Justice Yashwant Varma be directed to finish its work and submit its report? Or should the committee be allowed to lapse, on the assumption that Justice Varma’s resignation of April 9 has rendered its mandate infructuous? The answer turns on a reading of the Judges (Inquiry) Act, 1968, and the Act does not, in terms, decide it.Last week’s Supreme Court order in Chandni Prateek Sharma v. High Court of Gujarat throws the question into sharper relief. Sharma, a Gujarat judicial officer, had been suspended on anonymous and signed complaints in February 2020. An inquiry held by the Principal District Judge, Amreli, after examining 21 witnesses, found seven of eight charges not proved. The Standing Committee of the Gujarat High Court rejected the report and directed a de novo inquiry. The bench of Justice P.S. Narasimha and Justice Alok Aradhe quashed the de novo order on April 21, holding that Rule 10 of the Gujarat Civil Services (Discipline and Appeal) Rules, 1971 permits only a further inquiry, not a fresh one. Sharma stands reinstated.Silence of an ActBeneath the Rule 10 holding sits a paragraph of subsidiary interest. Sharma had tried to resign in April 2024, while the inquiry was on foot. Her resignation was refused under Rule 36 of the Gujarat Civil Service (General Conditions of Services) Rules, 2002. Rule 36(2) makes resignation conditional on acceptance, and its proviso authorises rejection on three grounds: outstanding dues, suspension, and a contemplated or pending departmental inquiry. Rule 36(5) presumes against the withdrawal of an effective resignation, allowing it only on exceptional grounds or in the public interest. For a civil judge, the legislature has thought through the resignation-as-exit problem and closed it.The constitutional regime governing high court judges contains no such provision. Article 217(1)(a) allows a judge to resign by writing under his hand addressed to the President, and stops there. In Union of India v. Gopal Chandra Misra (1978), a Constitution Bench held that the President’s acceptance is not required and that the resignation operates by force of its own terms. The judgment is the foundational authority on the subject. It has not been disturbed in forty-eight years. What it did not address was the position of a judge resigning while a parliamentary inquiry is on foot. The case before the Bench did not present that question.That brings the question to the Judges (Inquiry) Act, which is the statute that governs the inquiry committee. The Act’s trigger is a motion for the removal of a Judge as defined in Section 2(c). The definition was satisfied when the motion was admitted and the committee constituted. The committee was lawfully formed. From that moment, it acquired a statutory mandate to investigate the charges and to report. The Act is silent on what happens to that mandate if the judge resigns before the committee submits its report.In public interestTwo readings of the silence are open. The first treats the inquiry as ancillary to the removal motion. Sections 3(5) and 3(6), which speak of the judge’s fitness to continue in office, and Section 6, which provides for the address praying for removal, all use language that fits a continuing officeholder. On this reading, the resignation removes the foundation of the proceeding. The committee’s mandate falls because the purpose for which it was constituted, the removal of the judge, has become infructuous.The second treats the committee’s duty to report under Section 4(2) as unconditional. The provision requires the committee, at the conclusion of its investigation, to submit its findings on each of the charges. The duty is not framed in terms of the judge’s continued status. On this reading, the committee has a public-interest function that survives the loss of the removal motion. The findings have value as a record, even if no removal can follow.Three considerations push the choice toward continuation. The first is the public-interest character of the inquiry itself. The committee is constituted not to serve the judge’s interest, nor the petitioning members’ interest, but to make findings on charges of judicial misbehaviour. That public interest does not vanish with the judge’s resignation. The second is the pattern of repetition. Justice Soumitra Sen resigned in September 2011 after the Rajya Sabha had voted but before the Lok Sabha could. Justice P.D. Dinakaran resigned in July 2011, a day before the inquiry committee’s first sitting, and a week later sought to withdraw his resignation when it became clear the committee was preparing to continue. Justice Varma’s resignation is the third in this sequence. Each has come earlier in the proceedings than the last. A reading of the Act that rewards this trajectory by terminating the committee’s mandate the moment a resignation is tendered makes the Act’s accountability function progressively weaker.The third is the broader picture into which the choice fits. Chandni Prateek Sharma is not an authority for any proposition about high court judges, and nothing follows from it for the reading of the 1968 Act. It does, however, illustrate the direction in which the rest of the Indian legal order has moved when faced with the resignation-as-exit problem. Rule 36 and its analogues across other service rule-books have, over decades, settled into a position that gives the employer some discretion to refuse a resignation tendered while a disciplinary proceeding is pending or contemplated. The constitutional regime cannot adopt that position at the point of resignation, because Gopal Chandra Misra has settled the point. But the choice the Speaker now faces is not about the act of resignation. It is about what happens to a committee already at work. The two readings of the Act remain available on their own terms. Whichever the Speaker adopts will sit, in due course, alongside the larger pattern of how Indian law has chosen to approach the same problem in adjacent fields.None of this establishes that the second reading is right. It establishes that the second reading is available, that it is consistent with the Act’s text, and that it serves purposes the Act was enacted to advance. The Speaker has the choice. He can direct the committee to discharge its Section 4(2) duty and submit its report. He can let the committee lapse on the precedent of 2011. The first preserves accountability at the price of leaving Section 6 infructuous. The second preserves a precedent at the price of allowing a third successive resignation to defeat a third successive inquiry.This is not an answer the Speaker needs to find in fresh legislation. It is an answer he can give by reading the Act before him.