Madhya Pradesh judicial officer Aditi Kumar Sharma, whose dismissal was quashed by the Supreme Court earlier this year, has resigned from service in protest against the elevation of a senior district judge whom she had accused of caste-based harassment, abuse of authority and institutional vendetta.
In a strongly-worded resignation letter addressed to the Madhya Pradesh High Court chief justice, Sharma said she was stepping down “not because I lost faith in justice, but because justice lost its way inside the very institution sworn to protect it.”
“I leave this institution with no medals, no celebration, and no bitterness — only the bitter truth that the judiciary failed me. But worse — it failed itself. This letter of resignation is not closure. It is a statement of protest. Let it remain in your archives as a reminder that there once was a woman judge in Madhya Pradesh who gave her all to justice, and was broken by the system that preached it the loudest,” she wrote.
Her resignation comes weeks after the Supreme Court collegium on July 2 recommended the elevation of Rajesh Kumar Gupta, principal district and sessions judge in Ujjain, to the Madhya Pradesh High Court. The government cleared his name on Monday. Hours later, Sharma put in her papers.
Calling Gupta's elevation “a cruel joke upon the very word justice,” Sharma said the move reflected a “failure of the judiciary to protect its daughters” and signalled to women officers that “truth comes at a heavier cost than silence.”
“I am resigning from judicial service, not because I failed the institution, but because the institution has failed me,” Sharma wrote in her letter, adding that she endured “unrelenting harassment, not merely of the body or the mind, but of my dignity, my voice, and my very existence as a woman judge who dared to speak up.”
The resignation, submitted this week, follows Sharma's earlier representation to the Chief Justice of India and other members of the Supreme Court collegium, urging them to reconsider Gupta's elevation. In that letter, Sharma warned that the judiciary risked rewarding impunity and silencing whistleblowers by promoting individuals facing credible allegations.
The BuckStopper, run by a group of seasoned journalists, holds the powerful accountable. The buck stops with them, as they cannot shrug off their official responsibilities.
