Kolkata, May 2 A three-judge special bench of the Calcutta High Court, created especially to hear the suo motu case on the harassment of advocates and public maligning of a judge of the same court during protest demonstrations against senior advocate and CPI-M Rajya Sabha member Bikas Ranjan Bhattacharya last month, on Friday directed Kolkata Police Commissioner Manoj Kumar Verma to personally investigate the matter.
The three-judge special division bench of Justice Arijit Bandopadhyay, Justice Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, and Justice Rajarshi Bharadwaj also directed the city Police Commissioner to file a detailed report to the court after completing the investigation at the earliest.
The city police were also asked to preserve the footage of CCTV cameras installed at the site of the protests in front of Bhattacharya’s office, which is in the vicinity of the Calcutta High Court complex.
The bench also ordered that legal notices in the matter be served to 15 individuals including the Trinamool Congress state General Secretary Kunal Ghosh. The Registrar General of the high court had been asked to ensure that the legal notices in the matter were served.
As the matter came up for hearing on Friday, the division bench observed that the sequence of the protest demonstration was quite unfortunate and also amounted to criminal contempt of court.
The protest took place in front of Bhattacharya’s chamber last month.
Bhattacharya, during the hearings of the school job scam cases in West Bengal, put forth several arguments, which the protesters believe helped in formulating the final judgement in the cases. As a result, they said, there were negative court orders resulting in the termination of the jobs of several teaching and non-teaching people in state-run schools.
During those protests last week, the protesters also used derogatory language against Justice Biswajit Basu for some of his negative observations in some of these cases in relation to school job scams.
The Calcutta High Court had, on April 29, initiated the suo motu proceedings after some members of the Calcutta High Court Bar Association drew the attention of the division bench of Chief Justice T.S. Sivagnanam and Justice Chaitali Chattopadhyay to the entire development and also filed a contempt of court petition.
Chief Justice Sivagnanam had admitted the petition and directed the Kolkata Police to immediately identify those involved in that ruckus. He also directed the Police Commissioner, Manoj Kumar Verma, to submit a report to the court on how, in the presence of police, the judiciary and courts had been subjected to such attacks.
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