COURT ON ITS OWN MOTION Vs. UMESH KUMAR

JUDGEMENT

(1.) On the 23rd day of March, 1995 Court Room No. 294, in the sprawling Tis Hazari Courts complex, was a witness to an unfortunate incident. On that day, at about 11.15 A.M., while a Metropolitan Magistrate (hereinafter referred to as the complainant) was in the thick of a judicial proceeding, an accused threw a polythene bag at him containing human excreta. It struck against an almirah and burst. Its contents flew around besmearing the wearing glasses, the turban and the robes of the complainant. The incident led to the filing of a complaint which came up for trial before another Metropolitan Magistrate who, after a trial, convicted and sentenced the accused under Sections 228, 353 and 355 of the Indian Penal Code. Though the main judgment convicting the accused consumed only 18 pages, the order on sentence ran into 80. Not that lengthy orders are not known. They are. However, what caught the discerning eye of a brother judge of this Court were the remarks passed therein by the trial Metropolitan Magistrate against the complainant. They are as under: (Page 34 - para 65) "It is beyond my imagination as to how a Magistrate, and that too a Judicial Magistrate, could, with such wantonness, violate personal liberty of this young, hapless and destitute Dalit, who had already suffered immensely. In fact, before the facts of that case came to my knowledge. I had never visualised that a Magistrate in Delhi could violate personal liberties to such a severe extent. I was under an impression that such judicial transgressions are reserved for remote areas only." (Page 37 para - 68) "...........The complainant had absolutely no regard for the mandatory requirements of a speedy trial. Nor he had any respect for personal liberty of the convict." (Page 39 - para 72) "The 22nd day of September, 1994 was one of the most significant days in the excruciatingly, protracted and unjustly conducted trial of the convict. It was on that day that clinching evidence came on record to establish beyond any shadow of doubt that the convict was innocent and had been falsely implicated by the police in that case. The convict deserved to be granted a clean equittal and set at liberty forthwith. Even a Kangaroo Court could not have ruled otherwise. But still, this convict had to wait for about 6-1/2 months to hear the verdict of acquittal, but without freedom, for the fetters of this case were on him by them." (Page 51 - para 87)

(2.) The remarks reproduced above are the subject-matter of ese suo motu proceedings under Section 482 of the Code of Criminal Procedure.

(3.) The eighty pages long order spun out by the trial Magistrate from the delay in the disposal of the criminal trial of the accused pending before the complainant and the information that the accused happened to be a dalit whose bail bond stood rejected by the complainant, starts with why "since generations" the judicial officers are addressed "with the designation: of "Your Honour", what that "expression" implies and how it "stoops to a vanishing point" and then travels through a long-winding invective harangue. He denounces the complainant in a manner which shocks. He reaches this desired result by going off on his tangents lending support to the studies on the psychology of human understanding, which have been synthesized in books such as E.S.Gombrich's Art and Illusion (1960) and Thomas Kahn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, indicating that the human mind can often interpret a single sense datum in more than one way and that the interpretation given to the datum depends upon pre-existing expectations in mind. But then, the human mind here being that of a trained judicial officer, it was expected to reason in the proper direction, look at the facts as they appeared, accept them as they were and curb any desire to twist them.