A courthouse clerk's son in Kottayam

The country around Thalayolaparambu and Kaduthuruthy, in the Vaikom region of Kottayam district, is flat backwater land where paddy fields run down to canals and the boundary between Travancore's old caste order and its reform movements was drawn and redrawn through the twentieth century. Konakuppakatil Gopinathan Balakrishnan was born into that landscape on 12 May 1945, into a family from a Scheduled Caste community with almost no experience of higher education. His father, Gopinathan, worked as a clerk in the munsiff's court at Vaikom. It was a job of small salary and considerable dignity, and it put the son inside a courtroom long before he had any thought of practising in one. His early schooling was at Thalayolaparambu, and he finished school at the government high school in Vaikom.

He took a bachelor's degree in science at Maharaja's College, Ernakulam, then studied law at the Government Law College in the same city, and later completed a master's degree in law. The route was unremarkable for a middle-class Kerala student of the period and extraordinary for a boy of his background; in the mid-1960s the number of Dalit law graduates in the state could be counted easily.

From the munsiff's court to the High Court bench

Balakrishnan enrolled with the Bar Council of Kerala on 16 March 1968 and began practising civil and criminal work, at first in the same small courts at Vaikom where his father had been a clerk, and later at Ernakulam. In January 1973 he joined the Kerala judicial service as a munsiff, the lowest rung of the subordinate judiciary. He did not stay. He resigned from service and returned to the bar, arguing before the Kerala High Court, and it was from the bar rather than from the district judiciary that he was eventually raised to the bench.

He was appointed a judge of the Kerala High Court on 26 September 1985 and served there for twelve years. In November 1997 he was transferred to the Gujarat High Court, and in July 1998 he became its Chief Justice; during that tenure he briefly discharged the functions of Governor of Gujarat in early 1999. In September 1999 he was moved again, as Chief Justice of the Madras High Court. On 8 June 2000 he was elevated to the Supreme Court of India.

The thirty-seventh Chief Justice of India

On 14 January 2007 Balakrishnan was sworn in as Chief Justice of India. Two facts about the appointment were noted everywhere: he was the first person from Kerala to hold the office, and he was the first Dalit to do so. Until B. R. Gavai's elevation in 2025 he remained the only one. He served until his retirement on 12 May 2010, a tenure of more than three years, which is unusually long for a Chief Justice of India given the seniority convention and the fixed retirement age. In July 2007 he administered the oath of office to Pratibha Patil, the first woman to become President of India.

His judicial output was substantial. He sat on several hundred benches of the Supreme Court and authored well over two hundred judgments across constitutional law, criminal law, service law and taxation. As Chief Justice he also carried a heavy administrative burden, presiding over the collegium and over a court whose pendency was growing faster than its capacity.

Judgments and public positions

Two decisions from his time on the court are most often cited. In 2008, heading a five-judge constitution bench in Ashoka Kumar Thakur v. Union of India, he upheld the reservation of twenty-seven per cent of seats for Other Backward Classes in central higher educational institutions, while affirming that the affluent creamy layer within those classes was to be excluded. It was one of the most consequential rulings on affirmative action since the Mandal litigation of the previous decade.

In May 2010, in the final days of his tenure, he delivered the judgment in Selvi v. State of Karnataka, which held that narcoanalysis, polygraph examination and brain-mapping could not be administered to a person without consent. The court read the protection against self-incrimination in Article 20(3) and the right to personal liberty in Article 21 together, and treated compulsory access to a person's mental processes as a violation of both. The ruling ended a period in which such techniques had been used with increasing casualness by investigating agencies.

His public positions were not uniformly popular. He took the view that the office of the Chief Justice of India did not fall within the ordinary reach of the Right to Information Act, a stance that drew sustained criticism from transparency campaigners and was later resolved against that position by the court itself. The debate it provoked about judicial accountability outlived his tenure.

After the bench

Within a month of retiring, Balakrishnan was appointed chairperson of the National Human Rights Commission of India, serving from 7 June 2010 until 11 May 2015. Under his chairmanship the commission took up, among other matters, the health consequences of endosulfan spraying in Kasaragod district in his home state. In October 2022 the Union government appointed him to head a three-member commission of inquiry examining whether Scheduled Caste status should be extended to persons of Scheduled Caste origin who had converted to religions outside those named in the Presidential Order under Article 341 - a question that has been before the Supreme Court for two decades.

The University of Cochin conferred an honorary doctorate on him in 2010. For the villages of Vaikom taluk, however, the plainer fact carries more weight: the son of a court clerk from a community historically kept outside the courtroom rose to preside over the highest court in the Republic.