The cash at home controversy that rocked India's judiciary has reached its dramatic conclusion, Justice Yashwant Varma of the Allahabad High Court has tendered his resignation to the President of India, becoming one of the most high-profile sitting judges to exit the bench under the shadow of an active parliamentary inquiry in recent memory. The resignation arrives at a moment of maximum institutional pressure, with a formal three-member committee already constituted under the Judges (Inquiry) Act, 1968 to examine the allegations against him, making his exit a defining moment for judicial accountability in India.
The controversy ignited on March 14, 2025, when firefighters responding to a blaze at the official residence of Justice Varma, then serving as a Delhi High Court judge, stumbled upon a substantial cache of unaccounted currency notes at an outhouse on the premises. What began as a fire-fighting operation swiftly became a constitutional crisis. Justice Varma fought back through the courts, first challenging the in-house inquiry and the Chief Justice of India's recommendation for his removal, and then separately assailing the Lok Sabha Speaker's decision to constitute an inquiry panel, both petitions were dismissed by the Supreme Court.
With 146 Members of Parliament having signed an impeachment motion, Speaker Om Birla reconstituted a three-member inquiry committee comprising Supreme Court Judge Justice Arvind Kumar, Bombay High Court Chief Justice Shree Chandrashekhar, and Senior Advocate Vasudeva Acharya of the Karnataka High Court.
With every legal avenue exhausted and the formal inquiry machinery now fully operational, Justice Varma chose resignation over proceedings, submitting his exit to the President with the pointed words, "I tender my resignation with deep anguish." Those five words encapsulate the arc of a controversy that began with burning currency and ended with a burning exit, a judge who fought the process at every stage, only to step away on the eve of its culmination.
The resignation effectively brings the inquiry to a close before it could deliver a finding, leaving unresolved the core question of how the cash came to be at his residence.
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