Devendra Kumar Upadhyaya

Upadhyaya was born on 16 June 1965 at Muskarai village in Uttar Pradesh's Ambedkar Nagar district. He studied at Colvin Taluqdars' College in Lucknow and completed his LL.B. from Lucknow University in 1991. He enrolled as an advocate on 11 May 1991 and practised mainly before the Lucknow Bench of the Allahabad High Court. He initially worked with his father, R.A. Upadhyaya, and later with Senior Advocates Mohd. Arif Khan and S.K. Kalia. His practice included civil, constitutional and service matters. He also served as Chief Standing Counsel for the State of Uttar Pradesh from May 2007 until his elevation to the Bench. He became an Additional Judge of the Allahabad High Court on 21 November 2011 and was made a permanent judge on 6 August 2013. On 28 March 2023, he became the Senior Judge of the Lucknow Bench.^[3]

Upadhyaya was appointed Chief Justice of the Bombay High Court in July 2023 and took oath on 29 July 2023. In recommending him, the Supreme Court Collegium noted his more than eleven years of judicial experience at the Allahabad High Court and his position as a senior puisne judge of his parent court.^[4] During his roughly eighteen-month tenure at Bombay, he initiated suo motu proceedings on issues including deaths of patients in government hospitals, air pollution in Mumbai and the dumping of garbage and plastic waste into the sea.^[5] In January 2025, while hearing the pollution matter, a bench headed by him directed the Maharashtra government to constitute an expert panel to examine measures including the feasibility of phasing out petrol and diesel vehicles in Mumbai in view of deteriorating air quality. His earlier Allahabad tenure also produced judgments in constitutional and social-rights matters; in X v. Union of India, for example, a bench headed by him held that a person otherwise fit for employment could not be denied employment or promotion merely because they were HIV-positive, treating such discrimination as inconsistent with Articles 14, 16 and 21.^[6]

The incident began with a fire at Justice Yashwant Varma's official residence on the night of 14 March 2025. On 15 March, information about the incident and the alleged presence of burnt currency at the premises reached Chief Justice Upadhyaya through the Delhi Police Commissioner. Upadhyaya was in Lucknow at the time and, after receiving the information, informed Chief Justice of India Sanjiv Khanna and sought further details. His Registrar-cum-Secretary visited the residence that evening and reported seeing burnt articles and debris in the room where the fire had occurred. After returning to Delhi on 16 March, Upadhyaya met the CJI and subsequently met Justice Varma on 17 March, showed him photographs and video material supplied by the Delhi Police Commissioner, and sought his response. Justice Varma denied that the cash belonged to him or his family and subsequently maintained that no currency had been placed in the storeroom by them.^[13]

The role of Upadhyaya became more formal as the matter developed. On 21 March, after a preliminary examination, he sent a report to the CJI expressing the prima facie view that the matter warranted a deeper probe.^[14] The report referred to the police account that debris and partially burnt articles had been removed from the room after the fire and stated that, on the material then available, the possibility of access to the room by persons other than the judge, his household staff, gardeners and CPWD personnel could not be established. At the CJI's direction, Upadhyaya also obtained Justice Varma's written response, details of his official staff and security personnel, and call-detail records covering the preceding six months. The Supreme Court Collegium separately recommended Varma's transfer to his parent Allahabad High Court; the Supreme Court expressly clarified that this transfer proposal was independent of the in-house inquiry initiated in relation to the incident.

Following the Supreme Court's decision to initiate an in-house inquiry, Upadhyaya was asked not to assign judicial work to Justice Varma, and the Delhi High Court formally withdrew his judicial work with immediate effect on 24 March 2025.^[15] A three-member committee was subsequently constituted by the CJI to examine the allegations. Its report was submitted on 4 May 2025.^[16] The later parliamentary inquiry into the matter, constituted after a removal motion was initiated against Varma, reached its own findings in 2026. Those later findings should be distinguished from Upadhyaya's preliminary report: his role was to make an initial institutional assessment and place the available material before the CJI, not to conduct the final inquiry into the allegations.