Chennai: It was an extraordinary sight. At 2.30 pm, advocates across the Madras high court campus slowly gravitated towards a 55’’ television set up near the Madras Bar Association gate. For most of the next 40 minutes, they stood and watched proceedings being beamed live from court hall 4, where a division bench of Justices S. Tamilvanan and C.T Selvam, was hearing a suo motu contempt petition against two Madurai based advocates.
On September 16, when the matter came up for hearing during the last hearing, over 100 advocates had assembled before the same court and indulged in sloganeering, disrupting proceedings.
This time, high court officials took no chances. Based on the direction of the bench the registry had made arrangements to beam the proceedings live. On the direction of registrar general, P. Kalaiarasan, security was beefed up in and around the campus since morning.
Uniformed personnel were spotted everywhere in the court premises. Over 500 uniformed personnel led by additional commissioner of police Ravikumar remained on guard through the day. Police teams under joint commissioner of police and deputy commissioner remained vigil at almost all the corners in the court.
Police placed iron barricades around the court hall-4 and prevented advocates and others from entering the court hall. When the matter came up today, police only permitted the counsels for both advocates and two members of Dr Ambedkar Advocate’s Association, who had filed an impleading petition in the case.
When the two judges entered the court hall, young advocates glued to the TV, welcomed them with a ‘thunderous’ applause and whistles. Over 200 advocates, court staffs and others watched the proceedings closely on the TV.
A few advocates have opposed the bench conducting the proceedings against their colleagues. However, others said “matter must come to an end as early as possible and normalcy restored soon”. Several leading Tamil television channels telecast the proceeding live lifting from TV. For the first time the people across the world watched the court proceedings in real time.
IGP draws HC’s ire over security to 3 advocates
A division bench which was hearing a suo moto contempt petition, was furious with an inspector-general of police for denying police protection for office-bearers of Dr Ambedkar Advocates’ Association, Dalit Tiger Ponnusamy, S.R.Rajagopalan and K. Arumugam. The court had earlier ordered protection for the three.
H.M.Jayaram, inspector general (welfare), Chennai, in his affidavit, had stated that before passing the order to provide security, the court could have obtained any threat assessment report from the police. Without hearing the department, directing to provide security to advocates, according to Jayaram, would be against principles of natural justice, the Bench said.
The bench said the IG had made reckless remarks in the affidavit. “It is also strange to us as to how public prosecutor S.Shanmugavelayutham, approved the remarks of the police officer, which was against law.”
The police officer has no locus standi to make the remarks. The order passed by this court, cannot be reviewed by the IG. However, without understanding the law, especially the Constitutional mandate, he had stated that providing security to the advocates would escalate the situation and lead to serious consequence. This is nothing but a clear contempt of court, bench said. After pronouncing the order, advocate-general A.L. Somayaji made submissions. Following this, the bench directed that the order be kept in abeyance.
