V. R. Krishna Iyer

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Justice V. R. Krishna Iyer (b. 14 November 1915) was born in the district of Palakkad now in Kerala, India . His father V. V. Rama Iyer was a lawyer.

He studied and graduated in Arts from Annamalai University in Tamil Nadu, studied at Madras Law College for a Bachelor of Law. In 1938, he enrolled as an advocate and was appointed to Ernakulam High Court.He also practised in the Thalesseri District Court.

He was appointed as a minister in the state government of Kerala following the victory of the Communist Party of India under E. M. S. Namboodiripad in the 1957 elections [1]. He was Home minister and minister for law, power, prisons, irrigation and social welfare.

For this reason, he is referred to, by critics, as a Communist, although he himself states that I was never a communist, though I shared the socialist dimensions with them [2].

He headed a committee which published the Report on Procedural Justice, which discussed a national project for free legal services for the poor in 1973.

V. R. Krishna Iyer became a judge of the Supreme Court of India in 1973. During this time, the Supreme Court interpreted Article 21 of the Constitution of India in the sense that the national government was obliged to provide free legal services to accused people in custody. He retired from the Supreme Court in November 1980.

In 1987 he was a candidate in the election to become President of India, supported by political parties opposed to the governing Congress (I) party. The Electoral College consisted of 4695 elected members of the Lok Sabha, the Rajya Sabha and of 25 State Legislative Assemblies, whose votes were weighted based on population and combined. Ramaswamy Venkataraman won the election with 72% of the weighted vote, while Justice Iyer had 27% of the weighted vote. [3] In 1998, he was awarded the M.A.Thomas National Human Rights Award by the Vigil India Movement. Among other activities in his retirement, he led the inquiry Crime Against Humanity - An Inquiry into the Carnage in Gujarat [4] into the 2002 Gujarat violence.

He was awarded Padma Vibhushan in 1999.He lives in Kozhikode. His brother VR Lakshmi Narayan retired as the Director General of Police, Tamil Nadu.

In an interview with Rediff in 2006, he expressed his belief that the Constitution of India was no longer being taken seriously in India and he expressed his pessimism regarding unemployment, hunger and human rights violations in India, along with the hope that the younger generation would be able to deal with these social problems. He also criticized what he alleged to be the rejection of socialism among modern Indians in contradiction to the socialist nature of India stated in its constitution.^[1]