Dissent shines brighter than majority: Justice Ujjal Bhuyan’s stand against environmental ruling

Justice B.R. Gavai retired recently as a judge of the Supreme Court of India. In the final days of his tenure, however, a decision delivered under his leadership as part of a larger bench triggered widespread concern.

A three-judge bench headed by him overturned—by a 2:1 majority—a powerful environmental judgment delivered only months earlier in May 2025 by Justices Abhay S. Oka and Ujjal Bhuyan in Vanashakti vs Union of India.

That May verdict had been a landmark. It categorically declared that granting ex-post-facto environmental clearances to projects already constructed in violation of the law was illegal. The two-judge bench struck down the Central Government’s Office Memoranda of 2017 and 2021, which had attempted to regularise such violations.

In clear terms, the court held that environmental impact must be assessed before a project begins—not after it is built, and certainly not after irreversible damage is done.

Why does prior environmental assessment matter so much? Because the very purpose of the Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) Notification, 2006—issued under the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986—is to evaluate the likely harm a project will cause to nature and people before a single brick is laid. That 1986 Act itself did not emerge in a vacuum.

It was Parliament’s response to one of the worst industrial disasters in history: the Bhopal gas tragedy of 2–3 December 1984. On that terrible night, deadly methyl isocyanate leaked from the Union Carbide factory, killing thousands in their sleep and condemning lakhs of people to lifelong illness. Environmental law in India is literally written in the blood of Bhopal’s victims.

Yet, successive governments chose to bypass this hard-won law. Projects worth over Rs 20,000 crore were allowed to be built first and then “regularised” later through the 2017 and 2021 circulars. Justices Oka and Bhuyan saw through the subterfuge and declared the entire practice unlawful.

The three-judge bench led by Justice Gavai set aside their verdict. The majority (Justices Gavai and K.V. Viswanathan) reasoned that upholding the May judgment would waste more than Rs 20,000 crore of public money already spent. With one stroke, ex-post-facto clearances were effectively restored—provided the violator paid a penalty.

Justice Ujjal Bhuyan, who was part of both benches, wrote a stirring 97-page dissent. He described the practice of constructing projects without prior EIA as “an anathema to environmental jurisprudence” and warned that monetising environmental sin would erode the very foundation of ecological protection.

History teaches us that dissents, even when overruled, can become the moral compass of the law.
In ADM Jabalpur vs Shivkant Shukla (1976), four judges of the Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice A.N. Ray, held that during the Emergency, even the right to life could be suspended and courts were powerless to intervene. Justice H.R. Khanna stood alone in dissent, asserting that the rule of law and personal liberty must endure even in the darkest times.

For his courage, he was superseded; he resigned in protest. Today, the majority judgment is remembered only with shame, while Justice Khanna’s dissent is celebrated as one of the finest moments in Indian constitutional history. In

2017, a nine-judge bench formally overruled ADM Jabalpur and buried it forever.
The present case is not identical, but the echo is unmistakable. When the protection of the environment is treated as an inconvenience to infrastructure ambitions, a strong judicial voice refusing to compromise becomes priceless.

Justice Ujjal Bhuyan’s dissent is such a voice. It will be read and cited by generations of lawyers, activists, and judges who believe that the earth’s future cannot be auctioned for the price of a penalty.

Who knows—one day, just as ADM Jabalpur was overturned, the majority ruling of November 2025 may itself be reversed, and the original Oka-Bhuyan judgment may return in triumph. And when that day comes, we in Assam will remember with quiet pride that the judge who refused to bend was one of our own.

Sometimes, in the long arc of justice, dissent turns out to be more glorious—and ultimately more victorious—than the ruling of the day.