The Bengal Government continued to suffer legal bruises. The State had to put up with a ‘double jeopardy’ in Calcutta High Court on Thursday which on one hand severely admonished the police for cavalier handling of the Barasat-Kamduni mass rape and murder case and questioned the legality of the Government’s decision to ban most-circulated newspapers from the public libraries.
The Thursday’s orders came close on the heels of the reverses suffered by the State in Supreme Court on the issue of holding panchayat elections.
A day after the CID submitted a half-baked chargesheet in the high-profile rape case that took place last month, the Division Bench of Chief Justice Arun Mishra and Justice Joymalya Bagchi directed a court-monitored investigation questioning the justification behind fixing time frame for completing probes in such cases all in order to gain cheap publicity.
Ostensibly, the remark was directed at Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee who had while paying a visit to Kamduni, the village where a college girl was subjected to a brutal mass rape, promised a chargesheet within 15 days and conviction within a month.
The Kamduni incident bordered the Delhi rape in terms of ferocity and shook the entire State bringing out the once pro-Mamata civil society on to the streets in a large procession late last month.
The court on Thursday commenting on the chargesheet submitted in haste by the special investigation team — which had apparently struck out three names from the chargesheet swapping the places of the prime accused named in the FIR with a co-accused apart from leaving a host of glaring discrepancies — said populists comments by the heads of administration often create pressure on the investigating officers and the judges trying the cases.
“Such comments to gain cheap publicity leaves scope for lacunae in investigation,” Bikash Bhattacharya senior counsel quoting the court said in an apparent remark to the CM.
The second jolt came to the Government when the Calcutta High Court in a separate case questioned the justifiability of the State Government in throwing out the largely circulated newspapers from the State-run and aided public libraries vide a notification.
The court ordered the Government to incorporate the newspapers including a host of Bengali and English dailies thus thrown out last year following an announcement by the Chief Minister who had ordered the inclusion of new dailies “in order to promote the weak and the small” to be procured by the libraries numbering about 2,400.
Fixing July 17 as the next date of hearing, the court said the Government should cancel its earlier notice before the case was taken up for hearing on the next date.
Earlier the court had also directed the inclusion of some party mouthpieces including that of the CPI(M) which had been delisted from the list of Government advertisements.