After West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, it is the turn of Assembly Speaker Biman Banerjee to circuitously question judicial decisions which according to him are navigated by the media trials so to say.
While speaking at a Trinamool Congress teachers’ conference, Speaker Banerjee on Sunday attacked a section of the media houses for hosting talk-shows on flimsiest issues influencing judicial decisions.
“Earlier a political party had fought its way up. But these days they have the mushrooming media houses to back them by peddling non-stories. These media companies often have nothing to do but to make mountain of a molehill,” he said alleging how the “talk-shows hosted by these channels on trifle issues tend to influence judicial decisions.”
He added, “Often these media groups take up subjudice issues in their television shows. Such media trials often influence the judicial decisions,” he maintained insisting “such practices are never desirable in a vibrant democracy.”
Curiously the Speaker had recently to eat the humble pie when the High Court allowed police action against some MlAs of the ruling Trinamool Congress for beating up a couple of legislators of the Opposition CPI(M) inside the Assembly after they demanded discussion on the source and of chit fund and their political links. In the melee that followed one left MlA got a fractured skull and another of his woman colleagues was severely beaten up by the Trinamool lawmakers.
Eventually the chit fund scam when it exploded in the face of the Government sucked into its vortex a host of Ministers and MPs from the ruling outfit.
The Marxists subsequently alleged that even the Speaker did not come to their help when they lodged a complaint against the errant MlAs. No action was taken against the authorities of the Government hospital —where the injured taken — for refusing treatment to the injured who were subsequently treated in a private facility as also in Delhi.
The ruling party leaders refused comments on whether the Speaker’s Sunday remarks amounted to using his chair to implicate a section of the judiciary much in the manner the Chief Minister had done last year by questioning the way judicial decisions were sold in lieu of money.
Reacting strongly to the Speaker’s statements advocate and law professor Srinjay Sengupta wondered how Banerjee a lawyer too in his own merit could make such comments. “Mr Banerjee himself knows well that the courts are considered to be the experts of all experts. It is childish to consider that the honourable judges would be taken in by comments made in the talk-shows. One wonders whether the judges even get time to watch these shows,” he said.