Although not many, there were instances of altercations between key leaders of the ruling party and Calcutta High Court judges during the previous West Bengal Left Front government
UPDATE – 10:04AM, SUN-JANUARY 15, 23
Calcutta: Although not many, there were instances of altercations between key leaders of the ruling party and Calcutta High Court judges during the previous Left Front government in West Bengal.
In 2003, the late Judge Amitava Lara of the Kolkata High Court opined in court that street rallies in Kolkata should be banned on weekdays. His observation was sparked when his vehicle bound for the courts got stuck on the road due to a rally by the ruling party.
The quarrel was only fueled by Judge Lala’s observation that Biman Boss, a senior CPI(M) leader and Chairman of the Left Front, raised the slogan “Bicharpoti Lala, Bangla Chhere Pala (Judge Lala, you best Escape from Bangladesh)”.
As controversy began and criticism began to pour in from different segments of society, both Bose and the party leadership decided to get ahead of the game and end the snowballing din. Soon Bosch visited Justice Lara’s court himself and apologized for coining such a slogan.
Many Left Front veterans believe that an apology to end the controversy was the brainchild of the late Jyoti Basu, a non-90-something Indian Marxist and longest-serving chief minister of West Bengal.
This time, however, the defamation campaign against Calcutta High Court Judge Rajasekhar Mantha has crossed all lines throughout the past week, with not the verdict but a specific representative of the judiciary being the target of the worst political attack the Supreme Court has ever seen . Courthouse and outside.
The fiasco began on the morning of Jan. 9 after defamatory posters were seen affixed to the walls of the residence and adjoining districts of Judge Manta, who was accused of favoring West Bengal Assembly opposition leader Suvindu Adhikari ( Suvendu Adhikari) was slammed.
In the poster, he was also slammed for the recent judgment that removed the protective shield from any cohesion action, including arrests, by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) against Maneka Gambhir, national secretary of the Trinamool Congress and the party’s Lok Sabha. Sister-in-law member Abhishek Banerjee.
From the same day, a section of the Kolkata High Court lawyers started boycotting the seat of Justice Mansa and started boycotting other professionals from entering his court. The fiasco continued on Monday and Tuesday until Wednesday morning, when Judge Mansa issued a contempt ruling and filed a suo motu petition on the matter.
While resistance to getting into his courtroom has stopped, a large segment of prosecutors and government defenders continues to resist his bench, affecting the progress of cases in which the state is a party.
While the Trinamool Congressional leadership denied the party was connected to the development, while insisting that some of Justice Mansa’s judgments and decisions were bound to have a negative impact, the political battle was in full swing over the development. Opposition parties such as the BJP and CPI(M) have questioned the Chief Minister’s absolute silence on the matter.
There, the nation’s legal minds began to ask the question how a judge of the Calcutta High Court could be the target of such malicious slander simply because a particular party was dissatisfied with certain judgments and opinions of representatives of that judiciary.
Both Chief Justice Prakash Srivastava and Justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay of the Kolkata High Court expressed their outright displeasure at the development.
Justice Srivastava observed that the country’s oldest high court has its own legacy, and a judge of that court was attacked on a personal level with such bad words. Judge Gangopadhyay claimed that a clear attempt to intimidate members of the judiciary was being carried out in West Bengal.
While observing that this was certainly an attempt to intimidate the judiciary, former Supreme Court justice Justice Ashok Kumar Ganguly (retired) said that the country’s great judicial system is not so fragile that it would collapse under such political pressure.
Deputy Attorney-General Billwadal Bhattacharyya said such disgrace would never happen in a courtroom anywhere in the world. “The developments are sending a bad signal to the whole country,” he said.
Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharya, senior advocate at the Kolkata High Court and member of the CPI(M) Rajya Sabha, explained that if any person is not satisfied with a particular verdict, he or she can move to a higher judge or even a higher court to challenge the order. “But under no circumstances should a judge be subjected to such vicious personal attacks,” he said.
Even former Indian Police Service (IPS) officials, such as retired Additional Director-General Nazrul Islam, were curious that even five days after the posting was discovered, the police failed to catch the culprit, despite a closed circuit late Sunday night. Television footage showed two masked men putting up posters in front of Judge Mansha’s residence.
“The failure to track down the perpetrator after so many days definitely puts a question mark on the effectiveness of the city police and its intelligence services,” Islam said.
