1. Altamas Kabir was an Indian lawyer and judge who served as the 39th Chief Justice of India.
14 Facts About Altamas Kabir
1. 2.
Altamas Kabir was born in Calcutta in 1948 to a Bengali Muslim family from the district of Faridpur.
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Altamas Kabir studied at the Mount Hermon School, Darjeeling, and the Calcutta Boys' School.
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Altamas Kabir's father, Jehangir Kabir, was a leading Congress politician and trade union leader from West Bengal who served as the Minister in the BC Roy and P C Sen ministries and went on to become a minister in the first non-Congress government in West Bengal in 1967, with Ajoy Kumar Mukherjee as the Chief Minister of West Bengal.
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Altamas Kabir was made a permanent judge of the Calcutta High Court on 6 August 1990.
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Altamas Kabir was appointed to the office of acting Chief Justice of Calcutta High Court on 11 January 2005.
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Altamas Kabir became the acting chief justice of the Jharkhand High Court on 3 January 2005, an elevation made permanent on 1 March 2005.
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Altamas Kabir was elevated to the Supreme Court of India as Justice on 9 September 2005.
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Altamas Kabir presided over the contempt case against prominent advocate and Team Anna member Prashant Bhushan after he alleged that half of the most recent 16 CJIs had been corrupt.
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On 19 October 2012, Altamas Kabir granted bail to journalist Syed Mohammed Ahmed Kazmi, arrested for alleged involvement in an Israeli embassy vehicle blast in which an Israeli diplomat's wife was injured.
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In 2013, Altamas Kabir, then serving as CJI, became embroiled in a controversy involving his sister, lawyer Shukla Altamas Kabir Sinha, and Gujarat High Court Chief Justice Bhaskar Bhattacharya.
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Bhattacharya alleged that the reason was his opposition to the appointment of Shukla Altamas Kabir Sinha to the bench of the Calcutta High Court while he was a member of that court's collegium in 2010.
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On 18 July 2013, in a judgement that was later set aside, a bench headed by Altamas Kabir quashed the National Eligibility and Entrance Test for admissions to medical colleges in India.
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In 2016, former Chief Minister and Arunachal Pradesh politician Kalikho Pul claimed, in a suicide note, that Altamas Kabir had passed wrong judgements regarding the public distribution system scam in the state.