A few days ago, as CJI Dipak Misra passed a people-friendly order advising the agitating lawyers to call off strike and return to court work, a mob of miscreants guised as lawyers burnt an effigy of the CJI after striking the inanimate object with footwear to demonstrate utter displeasure and anger against indifference of the apex court.
The brazenly shameful act was mindlessly aired by TV channels without once realising that the CJI was only imposing a prevailing norm. Thousands of litigants were suffering and judges sitting idle with heaps of pending cases. A rule of not permitting lawyers to strike work for more than one day in a year, only if the matter was rarest of rare in nature, has been in place for long. Grapevine said old enemies had provoked mobsters to commit the despicable act with the sole view to defaming Misra in his last days as CJI.
The strike story runs thus: a guy gets apprehended by police at some place in Cuttack. The helpless individual, in an inebriated condition, goes wild and heated words are exchanged with a scuffle ensuing. The volatile police team vanquishes the guy with a few blows causing deep injury as per the guy’s version. It so happens that the victim is a lawyer. That fact pulls the skies down to ground as lawyers from all around rush in and all hell breaks loose.
The situation becomes difficult; police use all tricks to keep clear of trouble. Lawyers unite to bring the violent police officials to book. The worst part of the story is not a single mediaperson ever wanted to know or tell the real truth: the guy was not at legal work when police caught up with him. But the lawyer community turned violent imagining they can get away with every wrong by extracting favourable orders from courts.
The police committed a few grave mistakes: the ‘deep injury on the head’ of the lawyer was allegedly bungled by medical experts under pressure to be shown as a ‘minor bruise’. So, the FIR was filed with deep injury attracting IPC 307 indicating attempt to murder was not taken seriously. The agitation became more fierce from thereon. The lawyers struck work and the agitation fire spread across the State. The demand focused on arrest of the IIC on IPC 307 and not havildar-constable rank guys. This never happened; and hence, the present impasse.
A lot of rumour was heard about former colleagues, one or two of them, worked overtime to keep hoodlums happy with cash and kind to have havoc caused only to offend and disconcert Dipak Misra. The elements in the garb of lawyers did all that is not socially acceptable. Even decent lawyers were heard saying the violent guys were difficult to recognise as the faces had never shown up before. The lawyers took a bad name as the hoodlums had a heyday. Police biggies, despite being aware of the blunder, could do precious little. Their primary displeasure has been over the protective treatment given to erring police guys as shall never be done to an ordinary citizen in a similar situation. ‘Discrimination is condemned’, the lawyers keep saying. The police administration should have nabbed the errant ones to sooth the fuming lawyers quite in good time as they have hundreds of ways to get the arrested ones out of captivity or trouble.
As is so well-known, the Supreme Court has ruled several times that lawyers cannot strike work insanely because the act affects thousands of innocent people seeking relief. Lawyers are considered a good Samaritan community. Like power, water and train services, their noble services are respected as extremely essential. For all this, the Bar Council is expected to dismiss the lawyers engaged in violent acts of agitation.
The lawyers could have done far too better by exerting pressure on the administrative machinery including the police establishment rather than locking up courts because the judges can’t be harsh in words, wield power or display physical strength. The courts are obviously very soft and easy targets. So, the lawyers, most of them insensitive to public agony, chose the easiest wrong than the harder right. They are scared of intimidating the administrative systems that are in place to deliver immediate field relief. Hence, the soft target of courts.
Most painfully, the media never carried the fundamental truth of what the lawyers should not be doing. The media masters never go deep into the basics nor are keen to dig out the core facts.
They are crazy about sensation to ensure bumper sale of their products. Television guys are the worst. They rush to any place at the drop of a hat and cook up stories with wild interpretation of events. When the effigy of Dipak Misra was set ablaze, not one mediaperson had expressed anguish over an unforgivable blunder. Reporters are mostly an untrained and unskilled lot, for which quality news gathering and analysis do not happen. Their cash-hungry employers too are callous to public anguish.
All the same, Dipak Misra as CJI did not fail to keep promise. Even after the unfortunate incident in his own hometown, he dared fly down to attend a national conference at the Odisha Judicial Academy and return the same evening to say ‘goodbye’ to the Supreme Court colleagues, his staffs and other inmates on the morrow.
That he turned up where some wicked ones inflicted insult without any cause, proves he always had noble intentions despite having committed some administrative mistakes, perhaps unwittingly, at the workplace. Justice Misra is certainly not a saint, but the treatment meted out to him by those disguised as lawyers speak extremely ill of insanely jealous adversaries. If true at all, these characters are plain sick in mind as they have borne a grudge of the remote past to this day. Whatever be the ‘hurt feeling', the effigy burning of one of their own has been seen as ‘devilish vendetta’.
His elevation to the enviably lofty post was made out to be farcically controversial as some so-called activists, provoked by the adversaries in hiding, had tipped the top judiciary selectors about some cooked-up land scam Misra was allegedly involved in as a lawyer in Cuttack decades ago. But providence got him installed where he belonged and the rest is now history. Even advocate Prashant Bhushan, known as bitterly opposed to Dipak’s elevation, had filed a contempt petition in the Supreme Court against the propensity of lawyers to go on strike. At least 100 days have already been lost this year across various Indian courts to strikes by lawyers, mostly on flimsy grounds. Advocates at the Rajasthan High Court’s Jaipur Bench have been striking every Friday for the last 30 years; and in Meerut of Uttar Pradesh, every Saturday is dedicated to lawyers’ strike over the last 15 years.
Under a law laid down by the Supreme Court in 2002, lawyers are allowed ‘protest abstention from work for not more than one day’ in case of the ‘rarest of rare’ cases where the dignity, integrity and independence of the Bar or Bench is at stake. In the last few years, bar associations have interpreted the expression ‘rarest of rare’ to mean a variety of trivial things leaving the clients to suffer. The unruly Delhi High Court Bar Association members suspended their own president Rajiv Khosla only because he had commented that court boycotts are a ‘futile exercise'. The Allahabad High Court had a bolder reaction to the BCI’s March 23 nationwide strike by formulating measures to tighten security in the High Court and Uttar Pradesh district courts. Chief Justice DY Chandrachud’s seven-judge Bench observed that the Supreme Court judgment had been grossly flouted by the lawyers associations.
The Supreme Court has made it amply clear that a strike by the Bar is without the authority of law. Any officer convening a meeting for the purpose would be liable to be held personally responsible along with others who interfere in the functioning of the courts. That sums up conclusively the futility of the lawyers strike in Odisha.
(The writer is a core member of Transparency International, Odisha)