The Supreme Court held activist-lawyer Prashant Bhushan guilty of contempt for his two derogatory tweets against the judiciary. On August 20, it will hear the arguments on quantum of sentence to be awarded to Bhushan in the matter. pic/ptI
The Supreme Court took just 22 days to declare lawyer Prashant Bhushan guilty of contempt of court. Yet the same court has moved at less than snail's pace on two contempt matters pertaining to the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. One of these petitions has been pending before it for 27 years, the other for 25 years.
After the Babri Masjid was razed on December 6, 1992, the Supreme Court initiated suo motu contempt proceedings against the then Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Kalyan Singh and officials of the state government. This was because they had assured the court that the kar seva, scheduled for December 6, 1992, was to be symbolic, and that no harm would come to Babri Masjid.
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The second petition was of Mohammad Hashim Ansari, the co-plaintiff in the first title suit of 1961 that lay claim to Babri Masjid. Ansari presumably believed some politicians were as guilty of contempt as Singh, as they too had "deliberately and wilfully" violated the Supreme Court and Allahabad High Court orders on the mosque.
Filed in 1993 and admitted two years later, Ansari's petition was a prayer for initiating contempt proceedings against then Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao, then Home Minister SB Chavan, and leaders belonging to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and its affiliates — LK Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi, Kalyan Singh, Vijaya Raje Scindia and Ashok Singhal.
On December 5, 2017, after then Chief Justice Dipak Misra fixed February 8, 2018, as the date from which the final arguments in the Ayodhya title dispute would begin, Shakil Ahmed Syed, counsel for Ansari, inquired from the Supreme Court Registry why their petition had not been listed for 23 years. The Registry asked Syed to file an application for setting aside abatement of the petition.
The application for abatement had to be filed because Ansari had died in 2016, and more than 90 days had passed without his name being substituted by his legal heir — his son Iqbal Ansari. There was also the issue of deleting from the contempt petition the names of respondents who had died — Rao, Chavan, Scindia and Singhal.
The last order on Ansari's petition was of Justice Arun Mishra, who headed the three-member bench of the Supreme Court that held Bhushan guilty of contempt. Mishra's order, dated May 7, 2018, allowed the deletion of the names of those dead. Let alone Ansari's petition, the Supreme Court has not even demonstrated the enthusiasm to pursue its own suo motu contempt proceedings against Singh.
Many confuse this petition for another one that was filed against him in a different matter related to the Ayodhya dispute — and for which he was punished. As Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister, Singh had acquired the 2.77 acres of disputed land in Ayodhya, on a portion of which had stood the Babri Masjid. Both the Allahabad High Court and the Supreme Court had told Singh to maintain the status quo there. It was subsequently found that large-scale construction work of a permanent nature had been carried out at the disputed site. For violating the court orders, then Chief Justice MN Venkatachaliah and Justice GN Ray sentenced him to a day of imprisonment.
Their judgment noted, "Though the proceedings for suo motu contempt against the then chief minister of the state of Uttar Pradesh and its officers in relation to the happening of 6-12-1992 were initiated, those are pending and shall be dealt with independently." Alas, those still remain pending, prompting journalist and author Manoj Mitta to write, on the 25th anniversary of the Babri Masjid demolition: "Despite such a clarification, those proceedings have never been dealt with, independently or otherwise. It's as if, after Kalyan Singh's perfidy, it was the Supreme Court's turn to let the nation down."
It is hard to fathom why the Supreme Court hurriedly disposes of one contempt petition and sits on others. This duality of approach certainly does not smack of the Supreme Court having a class bias, a charge the late Communist leader EMS Namboodiripad once made against it. At a press conference in 1967, Namboodiripad said the judges were dominated by "class hatred, class prejudices," and "where the evidence is balanced between a well-dressed pot-bellied rich man and a poor-ill-dressed and illiterate person, the judge instinctively favours the former."
Given that Namboodiripad was found guilty of contempt of court, it is prudent not to speculate even on the possible reasons behind the Supreme Court's contrasting approach on contempt petitions regarding Bhushan and the Babri Masjid. But what is indisputable ought to be stated — that the speed the Supreme Court showed in Bhushan's case has not been witnessed on issues such as the reading down of Article 370, the habeas corpus petitions filed on behalf of Kashmiri detainees, the enactment of the Citizenship Amendment Act, the 10 percent quota for Economically Weaker Sections and such like.
All these were the decisions of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whom Justice Mishra, in February, hailed as a "versatile genius, who thinks globally and acts locally." Justice Mishra is due to retire on 2 September.
The writer is a senior journalist
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