Justice Varma denies cash recovery, questions probe as impeachment panel hears his defense

Allahabad High Court judge Justice Yashwant Varma has firmly rejected allegations that cash was recovered from his official residence in Delhi during a fire last year, telling a parliamentary committee probing his impeachment that he was not even in the Capital when the incident occurred and cannot be held responsible for failures by authorities to secure the site.

Appearing before the three-member panel headed by Supreme Court judge Justice Aravind Kumar, Justice Varma said police and fire department personnel who were the first responders had failed to follow mandatory procedures after the blaze broke out on the night of March 14–15, sources familiar with the proceedings said.

According to these sources, Justice Varma reiterated the same defence he had placed before an earlier in-house inquiry panel and the Supreme Court — that there is no official record of any cash being recovered from the site of the fire, which was confined to an outhouse and not the residential portion of the premises.

He is also learnt to have pointed out that the outhouse is located close to a CRPF barracks and is accessible to several people, undermining the claim that anything found there could be attributed to him. The absence of CCTV footage, he argued, further weakens the allegations.

Justice Varma has been at the centre of a storm since claims surfaced that large sums of cash were discovered at his residence during the fire. On March 20, the Supreme Court Collegium recommended his transfer from the Delhi High Court to the Allahabad High Court. Two days later, the then Chief Justice of India, Sanjiv Khanna, constituted a three-member in-house committee to examine the allegations.

That panel found substance in the charges and forwarded its findings to the President and the Prime Minister for further action. Justice Varma subsequently challenged the constitutional validity of the in-house inquiry before the Supreme Court, but on August 7, 2025, a two-judge Bench dismissed his plea, ruling that there had been no procedural irregularity.

Impeachment motions were then moved in both Houses of Parliament, prompting the Lok Sabha Speaker to constitute a statutory inquiry committee under the Judges (Inquiry) Act, 1968. Besides Justice Aravind Kumar, the panel includes Justice Manindra Mohan Shrivastava, Chief Justice of the Madras High Court, and senior advocate B V Acharya.

Justice Varma has also questioned the legality of this parliamentary panel before the Supreme Court. While reserving its verdict on his petition, the apex court has declined to grant him additional time to reply to the notice issued by the committee, clearing the way for the impeachment inquiry to proceed.