Justice Markandey Katju has continued his indictment of the collegium system on his blog, now alleging that then-Chief Justice of India (CJI) KG Balakrishnan pushed hard for the elevation of Justice PD Dinakaran to the Supreme Court, despite strong evidence of corruption against the latter.

While not mentioning Dinakaran by name but dropping enough hints about his identity, Katju recounted from his own time as a Supreme Court judge, when he had told his senior brother judge Justice SH Kapadia (who was on the collegium and whom Katju said he holds “in great respect for his high integrity”) of the “very bad reputation” of Dinakaran in terms of integrity. Katju claimed he gave Kapadia “many details” that Katju was privy to because he was chief justice of the Madras high court where “this judge” was on a bench.

Katju blogged in his post with the title “How the Collegium actually works": [Editor's note: The blog post has been deleted. It is still accessible over Google's cache for now here]

Justice Kapadia thanked me for this information, and requested me to keep informing him about such matters. Despite my informing Justice Kapadia, the Collegium of the Supreme Court recommended this Judge for elevation to the Supreme Court, and he would certainly have been elevated but for the protests of lawyers of Tamilnadu who furnished documentary proof of that Judge’s corruption, e.g. large scale land grab done by him. Then he was transferred to Sikkim.

Katju claimed that Kapadia told him a year later that he remembered Katju’s warning but CJI Balakrishnan, also a former chief justice in Madras, had insisted on Dinakaran’s elevation because he claimed that the allegations against him were untrue.

Last week Katju had begun his collegium whistleblowing campaign by blogging allegations about successful government pressure on the collegium to extend the tenure of a judge, despite questions about his propriety, and earlier today he tweeted, implying that more than 20 per cent of judges were corrupt.