NEW DELHI: A press release has been issued by the Supreme Court’s Secretary General VSR Avadhani saying that the Deputy Registrar had resigned “on his own request as he wanted to pursue his interest in research projects in which he is involved in”.

In the press release, the registry of the Supreme Court has taken a serious objection to the news reports indicating that Anup Surendranath had resigned from his position in protest of the execution of Yakub Memon. It also released Anup’s resignation letter to substantiate its position. The press release added- “in order to dispel any misgivings created due to distorted news item, the Electronic and Print Media may immediately present the correct facts before the Public”.


In the official resignation letter, there is no mention of the fact that the resignation is being tendered to protest Yakub’s verdict.


However, Surendranath had written on Facebook about his resignation calling the events that transpired at Supreme Court in the last few days as the “proverbial final nail” and announced his resignation. He had also criticized the Memon verdict terming it an instance of “judicial abdication”.

On 30th July, Anup Surendranath wrote:


Thereafter, he wrote another post on 1st August:


Technically, if one were to go by the official resignation letter, Supreme Court Secretary General is right in saying that Surendranath didn’t resign to protest Yakub’s execution and rather to pursue further research on death penalty at National Law University, Delhi. But his Facebook post of August 1, is indicative of the reason why he might have resigned.

It seems from the post that he has some strong views about the Memon judgment.

Surendranth-- who is also the director of Death Penalty Research Project at NLU Delhi-- has been opposing death penalty on the basis of the empirical research produced so far under the project. This project is also the first-ever empirical work on the administration of death penalty in India. Through socio-economic profiling of death row convicts, it has been discovered that most of the death row convicts come from a marginalized background with little to no education and often they are first time offenders. The volume-1 of final report of the project is supposed to be released by the end of August 2015.

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