In a statement of protest, Shahdol Civil Judge Aditi Kumar Sharma resigned from judicial service on Monday — hours after the elevation of District Judge Rajesh Kumar Gupta to the Madhya Pradesh High Court.
Sharma accused Gupta of sustained harassment and denounced the judiciary for failing to act on her repeated pleas for redressal. The resignation follows multiple complaints made by Sharma earlier this year to the President of India, the Chief Justice of the Madhya Pradesh High Court, the Registrar General, the Supreme Court of India, and the Collegium, requesting reconsideration of Gupta’s elevation.
Sharma was also among six women judges whose services were terminated by the Madhya Pradesh government in June 2023. In her resignation, Sharma lays bare the toll of her alleged years-long ordeal, claiming the judiciary failed to uphold the very principles it swears to protect.
“With every ounce of my moral strength and emotional exhaustion, I hereby resign from judicial service not because I lost faith in justice, but because justice lost its way inside the very institution sworn to protect it,” she wrote.
Sharma said: “There comes a moment in every judge’s life when she is called to make a choice — not between right and wrong, but between silence and truth. Today, I choose truth, even if it comes at the cost of the very robe I once wore with reverence”.
Sharma said that she wrote the letter “with a shattered spirit and the ache of betrayal. Not at the hands of a criminal or an accused, but at the hands of the very system I swore to serve”.
She said she was “resigning from judicial service, not because I failed the institution—but because the institution has failed me”. “For years, I was subjected to unrelenting harassment—not merely of the body or the mind, but of my dignity, my voice, and my very existence as a woman judge who dared to speak up against a senior judge Rajesh Kumar Gupta wielding unaccountable power.”
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Following her written appeals to multiple authorities including the Chief Justice of India, she hoped “that if not justice, at least hearing might be granted”. “But silence was their verdict.”
Sharma said “in that silence, I saw the brutal truth of our times—that integrity is optional, power is protection, and those who speak the truth are punished more severely than those who violate it.”
Sharma alleged that the “same judiciary that sermonises about transparency from the bench failed to even follow the basic tenets of natural justice within its own halls”.
“Rajesh Kumar Gupta who orchestrated my suffering was not questioned—was rewarded. Recommended. Elevated. Given a pedestal instead of a summons. Shri Rajesh Kumar Gupta—the man I accused not lightly, not anonymously, but with documented facts and the raw courage only a wounded woman can summon—was not even asked to explain. No inquiry. No notice. No hearing. No accountability—is now titled Justice, a cruel joke upon the very word,” her letter read.
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Sharma’s letter raised larger questions about institutional silence and gender within the judiciary.
“What message does this send to the judiciary’s daughters? That they may be assaulted, humiliated, and institutionally erased—and their only real crime was daring to believe that the system would protect them?” the letter said.
Sharma wrote that “the ink of our Constitution may not have dried—but the conscience of those meant to uphold it has”.
“I was not asking for privilege. I was asking for [a] process. I was not demanding punishment. I was pleading for scrutiny. I was not seeking revenge. I was crying for justice—not just for myself, but for the institution I cherished and believed in even when it did not believe in me,” she wrote.
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Sharma said she left “with wounds that no reinstatement, no compensation, no apology will ever heal—but also with my truth intact.”
“Let this letter haunt the files it enters. Let it whisper in the hallways where silence once reigned. Let it live longer than the reputations hastily protected, and the wrongs quietly buried. I sign off not as an officer of the court, but as a victim of its silence…This letter of resignation is not closure. It is a statement of protest. Let it remain in your archives as a reminder that there once was a woman judge in Madhya Pradesh who gave her all to justice, and was broken by the system that preached it the loudest,” she wrote.
