NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court created history on Tuesday by holding sitting Calcutta HC judge C S Karnan guilty of contempt of court and punishing him with six month jail.
Times of India reported Karnan, who was to retire on June 11, will spend the last month of his tenure as judge and five months thereafter in jail. A seven-judge bench headed by CJI JS Khehar said Justice Karnan is guilty of contempt of SC, judiciary and judicial process.
The Supreme Court ordered West Bengal DGP to take into custody the disgraced judge, who never tired in playing his dalit background to berate and pass unconscionable orders against the seven judges who had intimated contempt proceeding against him for making wild allegations against his colleagues in Madras HC, from where he was transferred to Calcutta HC.
Additional solicitor general Maninder Singh, senior advocate KK Venugopal and Rupinder Singh Suri agreed with the apex court that Justice Karnan has committed gross contempt of court and needed to be punished exemplarily.
Venugopal took a while to think and said if Justice Karnan is sent to jail now it would create a blemish in the history of judiciary as a sitting judge being jailed. Should the court wait till his retirement, he asked.
But, the Supreme Court said contempt power does not recognise or differentiate who is what — a judge or a common man. "Whosoever commits contempt gets punished," the bench said while sentencing Justice Karnan.
Justice Karnan was sentenced in absentia. Taking note of his past purported judicial orders passed despite being stripped of judicial work, the Supreme Court also barred media from reporting his statements in future.
Earlier Calcutta High Court’s combative judge C S Karnan on Monday ordered a 5-year jail term and a fine of one lakh rupees each for Chief Justice of India and seven other judges of the Supreme Court “for offences under the SC/ST Atrocities Act 1989 and Amended Act of 2015,” the Hindustan Times reported.Calcutta high court judge C S Karnan evening ordered five-year rigorous imprisonment and a fine of rupees one lakh each for Chief Justice of India J S Khehar and seven other judges of the Supreme Court as “punishment for offences punishable under the Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe Atrocities Act 1989 and Amended Act of 2015.” If the judges failed to pay the fine, they would have to serve jail sentence for six more months.
Stating that “the judges had shown caste discrimination and hence had no locus standi to continue as Supreme Court judges, the order said that the fine amount has to be paid within a week to the National Commission, Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribes Constitutional body, at Khan Market, New Delhi.”
The order directed the Commissioner of Delhi Police to execute the order. “The accused are at liberty to approach Parliament,” it added. The order further added that since the compensation of Rs14 crore had not yet been paid to the victim judge (C S Karnan) the registrar general of the Supreme Court has to recover the sum from the salary of “each of the accused and remit the same to my account.”
The judge, in his earlier orders, had said that the CJI and other judges of the seven-member bench had insulted and humiliated him because he was a Dalit. He had criticised the suo motu contempt petition against him and ordered that restrained his administrative and judicial work.
Justice Karnan passed the suo motu 12-page order at his residence at New Town in the eastern fringe of Kolkata. It held CJI and justices Dipak Mishra, J Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, Madan B Lokur, Pinaki Chandra Ghose, Kurian Joseph and Justice Mrs R Bhanumathi as “accused”. The last judge, however, is not part of the seven-member bench that passed orders against Karnan in the contempt petition on February 8, 2017.