When a lawyer commits suicide after a heated argument in court, it should hit the headlines. But the national media has ignored a police lathi-charge on a mob of irate lawyers outside the chief justice’s chamber in the Jabalpur high court on September 30 after an advocate, Anurag Sahu, hung himself at home after a heated argument inside the courtroom with his opponent. Jabalpur is the judicial capital of Madhya Pradesh. And this is the first case where the lawyers took the corpse of their colleague clad in black robes to the chamber of their chief justice.
Arguments – whether heated or not – are a daily feature of an advocate’s life. Those who are hyper-sensitive to fighting in courts should not take to counsel practice which is a specialisation of those lawyers who want to argue and not merely do drafting file suits.
As news of his suicide spread, other advocates visited his home at Adhartal locality of Jabalpur after which a motley crowd of lawyers in black coats took Sahu’s corpse clad in his lawyer’s robes to the Jabalpur court building where they vandalised and torched the chamber of his opponent whom they blamed for his suicide.
These advocates then took Sahu’s corpse to the chamber of the chief justice to voice their protest. In the melee’, another advocate slit the nerve in his left hand which oozed blood. The chief justice summoned the police who lathi-charged the protesting advocates, injuring some of them.
The point here is this bizarre incident went unnoticed in the national media despite its news value. Counsels who appear in court have glib tongues and are ready with a quick repartee’ to both the judges and their opponents. Despite rivalries, they do not carry grudges outside the courtroom and are seen sipping tea in the court canteen, laughing with their opponents after bitter exchanges inside the court.
Unconfirmed reports said a high court judge had upbraided Anurag Sahu during the arguments. When the protesting lawyers went to his courtroom in search of him, he was nowhere to be found which irked them enough to take Sahu’s corpse to the chief justice’s chamber.
In similar incidents in the past, on November 9, 2009, Justices Gopala Gowda and Bangalore Nagarathna were sitting inside their courtroom when a huge posse of protesting lawyers locked them inside and cut off power supply. These two judges had to sit in the sweltering heat for over an hour before the then chief justice Paul Dinakaran and several other judges rescued them and escorted them through the jostling crowd of irate advocates who were protesting against corruption.
In 2020, the Karnataka high court again shot into the limelight when a woman judge who had retired, B S Indrakala, complained that she had paid Rs 8.5 crore as a bribe to an astrologer Yuvaraj Swami, to be appointed a governor. The judge hearing the bail plea of Swami quashed the bail granted to him by a magistrate. Again, this was the first instance of a retired high court judge admitting she paid Rs 8.5 crore to be appointed a governor.
On Monday, an advocate, Kailash Bahadur Singh was arrested for threatening to shoot a retired judge and chairman of the UP Real Estate Appellate Tribunal, D K Arora. The police alleged Singh was mentally unstable. He was upset over some disparaging remarks the retired judge Arora had allegedly made against another lawyer, Sunder Lal. This led to Bahadur Singh sending Arora a WhatsApp message threatening to shoot him, “as I am a Bahubali.” After Arora complained to the high court registrar, the police arrested Singh.
We realise that the judiciary is manned by flesh-and-blood men and women who make the same mistakes that ordinary people do. And the selection process for judges is faulty which is why the law minister, Kiren Rijiju has said the government is mulling over overhauling the selection procedure for judges. Had the process been perfect, we would not have had judges like C S Karnan who was arrested by the Chennai police in 2020 for uploading offensive videos on YouTube against judges of the Supreme Court and high court and their family members and wives.
In 1999, a judge from the Bombay City Civil and Sessions Court, J W Singh absconded after the police wanted to arrest him for promising to acquit gangsters loyal to Chhotta Shakeel during a recorded telephonic talk between the judge, Chhota Shakeel in Karachi and an advocate, L A Shaikh who was later murdered. After an ACP from Mumbai, Ambadas Pote, deposed in court that he recorded the conversation, the recording was played before the late chief justice of the Bombay high court, Y K Sabharwal, who suspended the judge and allowed the police to arrest him.
When the Free Press Journal contacted J W Singh in 1999 for his version, he was on the verge of tears and begged this journo not to publish the episode. Singh later absconded until he was found in Delhi and was sacked from the judiciary. But he was acquitted of the offence on a technicality.
Contrast this 1999 episode with the 2020 incident of Justice Indrakala of the Karnataka high court who paid Rs 8.5 crore to become a governor, the jailing of Justice C S Karnan and the lawyer who committed suicide in Jabalpur on September 30. What emerges is there will always be a few judges who need to be weeded out.
This is why the Law Commission of India (LCI) proposed an All India Judicial Service in 1958 on the lines of the Union Public Service Commission so that bright-and-fresh LL.Bs could be assigned to various states after selection. The LCI iterated this proposal in 1978 but in 1993 left the Centre to do what was needed after supporting the idea in 1992 in the All India Judges Association versus Union of India. The unsatisfactory collegium system was set up in 1993. The draft Bill prepared by the Parliamentary Standing Committee in 2006 still remains a draft bill.
(Dr. Olav Albuquerque holds a PhD in Law and is a senior journalist cum advocate of the Bombay High Court. He is an honorary member of the Goa Union of Journalists)
