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Letter to CJI: Lawyer wants contempt proceedings against Bengal bar council chairman
Kolkata: A lawyer and resident of West Bengal’s Howrah district on Wednesday sought consent from state advocate general Kishore Dutta to initiate contempt of court proceedings against Ashok Kumar Deb, chairman of the state bar council, who recently wrote a letter to Chief Justice of India NV Ramana seeking removal of acting chief justice of Calcutta high court, Justice Rajesh Bindal, and alleging biased and improper listing and hearing of cases, including the Narada scam case
Kolkata: A lawyer and resident of West Bengal’s Howrah district on Wednesday sought consent from state advocate general Kishore Dutta to initiate contempt of court proceedings against Ashok Kumar Deb, chairman of the state bar council, who recently wrote a letter to Chief Justice of India NV Ramana seeking removal of acting chief justice of Calcutta high court, Justice Rajesh Bindal, and alleging biased and improper listing and hearing of cases, including the Narada scam case.
Deb’s six-page letter to the CJI was dated June 25, but it was leaked to the media on the night of June 27.
Deb is a legislator from the Budge Budge assembly constituency in South 24 Parganas district. He has won the seat five times in a row since 1996 and is one of the oldest leaders of the ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC). Several TMC leaders are accused in the Narada case and two ministers were recently arrested.
On Wednesday, Vijay Kumar Singhal, a chartered accountant and lawyer, wrote to Dutta, saying Deb’s letter “casts wild allegations on the conduct of Justice Bindal.”
“The letter alleges him to be ‘BJP man’ and the administrative and judicial decisions that he has taken are to help promote the interests of the Bharatiya Janata Party,” Singhal wrote.
“The said letter scandalizes the court and the honourable judge as it is a calculated act performed for the purpose of lowering the authority of the court and the honourable judge in the minds of the public,” Singhal wrote in the letter, which was made public late on Wednesday evening.
“Contents of the letter amount to criminal contempt of court for which proceedings are liable to be initiated against advocate Ashok Kumar Deb in public interest…,” the letter said.
The advocate general could not be contacted but a public prosecutor said on condition of anonymity that Dutta was aware of Singhal’s letter.
Deb’s letter has raised a storm in the legal fraternity. Marked ‘confidential’, it was written on the letterhead of Bar Council of West Bengal, which represents all lawyers of the state.
Seven of the 22 members of the bar council’s elected executive body have decried Deb’s letter. They have said no meeting of the council was held to discuss its content and what Deb wrote cannot be construed to be the opinion of all the lawyers of Bengal although Deb started with the words, “We, the members of …”
On June 27, four of these seven members wrote a strongly worded letter to the CJI and also the Bar Council of India.
Talking to HT, Samir Pal, one of the four signatories, said, “The state bar council is a statutory body that has no political affiliation and its letterhead cannot have the emblem of the Ashok Stambh that Deb has used. He could have written a letter to anyone in his capacity as TMC MLA but instead he used the name of the bar council. Things he wrote are not only derogatory but also put a question mark on our education and culture. It is his political agenda. This is a black day for the judicial system.”
HT tried to contact Deb several times but he did not pick up the phone.
