Justice (retd) P P Naolekar, who was named by the Centre as chairman of the High-Level Committee on Demographic Change Tuesday, served in the Supreme Court from 2004 to 2009, during which he was part of a Bench that confirmed the death penalty for Parliament attack accused Afzal Guru, as well as heard a plea regarding Section 377 criminalising homosexuality.

However, Justice Naolekar’s most notable stint, marked by controversy, was as the Lokayukta of Madhya Pradesh, a post he was named to after retiring from the Supreme Court.

The posting marked a return to home ground for Justice Naolekar, whose grandfather and father were both prominent advocates in the Jabalpur Bench of the Madhya Pradesh High Court. Justice Naolekar did his Bachelor’s in Commerce and Law from Jabalpur University, enrolling with the Bar in December 1965. Among those he worked under was J S Verma, who would go on to become the Chief Justice of India.

When he was named as the Lokayukta in June 2009, under the BJP government led by Shivraj Singh Chouhan in Madhya Pradesh, RTI activist Ajay Dubey alleged that mandatory procedures had not been followed and no selection panel constituted. This led to then Governor Ram Naresh Yadav ordering “necessary action”.

Subsequently, former state DGP Arun Gurtoo and Dubey petitioned the Supreme Court, alleging that Chouhan had played a “central” role in Justice Naolekar’s appointment, at a time when the Lokayukta was hearing a corruption case against the Chief Minister. The petition was later withdrawn, and within a year, the Lokayukta office under Justice Naolekar submitted a closure report exonerating Chouhan and his wife Sadhna Singh in an alleged “dumper scam”.

The Congress challenged the closure report in the High Court and sought a CBI probe. An MLA of the Congress who put out a doctored photo to show close links of Justice Naolekar with the RSS was arrested in February 2012.

In 2014, the Chouhan government amended the MP Lokayukta and Uplokayukta Act to allow incumbent Lokayuktas to continue in office beyond their statutory six-year term until a replacement was named. Justice Naolekar, whose term was to originally end in 2015, demitted office in 2016.

In 2018, then BJP president Amit Shah visited Justice Naolekar at his Jabalpur residence as part of the party’s ‘Sampark for Samarthan’ campaign – a pre-election outreach programme. The party shared photographs of the visit as a formal press release.

Before he moved to the Supreme Court in 2004, Justice Naolekar served in several High Courts. He was elevated from the Bar as a permanent judge of the Madhya Pradesh High Court in June 1992, was transferred to the Rajasthan High Court two years later and, after serving there for eight years, was named as Chief Justice of the Gauhati High Court. Within two years, he was elevated to the Supreme Court.

In 2005, a Bench of which Justice Naolekar was a part along with Justice M B Shah upheld the death sentence awarded to Afzal Guru in the Parliament attack case, while reducing the term of co-accused Shaukat Hussain Guru from capital punishment to 10 years’ imprisonment. It upheld the acquittal of S A R Geelani and Afsan Guru.

In April 2006, a Bench of Justice Naolekar and Justice Y K Sabharwal heard the Naz Foundation’s appeal against the Delhi High Court’s dismissal of its petition challenging Section 377 of the IPC that criminalised even consensual same-sex relations.

The High Court called it a purely academic challenge to the constitutionality of a legislative provision, with no cause for action. The Supreme Court Bench including Justice Naolekar held that the High Court could not refuse to hear a constitutional question simply because it was framed in the abstract and no prosecution happened to be pending. The case went back to the Delhi High Court and, in 2009, it declared Section 377 unconstitutional.

In December 2007, Justice Naolekar authored the judgment in Eastern Book Company v D B Modak case, where the question before him and Justice B N Agrawal was whether a legal publisher’s edited version of Supreme Court judgments, headnotes, paragraph numbers, cross-references, and editorial notes could attract copyright, or whether the public domain character of court decisions meant there was no such protection attached.

The judgment drew on copyright standards of the United States and Canada, and observed that while raw judicial opinions were government works expressly excluded from copyright restrictions under Section 52 of the Copyright Act, editorial inputs requiring genuine skill and judgment, distinct from purely mechanical formating, did qualify for protection.

The judgment hence moved Indian copyright law away from the old “sweat of the brow” doctrine towards a creativity threshold.

Apart from Justice Naolekar as chairman, the panel on demographic change will include Census Commissioner Durga Shankar Mishra, retired IPS officer Balaji Srivastava, and Dr Shamika Ravi as members.

Union Home Minister Amit Shah posted on X that the committee will conduct a “comprehensive assessment of demographic changes taking place across India due to illegal migration and other unnatural causes”. “It will analyse patterns of abnormal population changes at the level of religious and social communities, and propose a planned and time-bound solution.”