RAJ KISHORE YADAVA Vs. PRINCIPAL KENDRIYA VIDYALAYA

JUDGEMENT

(1.) IS the civil contempt jurisdiction wrongly structured at the Allahabad High Court ? The concern of the Court is only on matters of civil contempt as opposed to criminal contempt or contempt ex facie curaei. It is logical that civil contempt will arise only should there be a complaint to a Court that an order, direction or judgment, has been violated. This in itself implies that there must be a proceeding, pending or decided, to occasion a complaint on the violation of the directions of the Court, whatever they may be. At the Allahabad High Court, of late, there has been unnecessary duplication of proceedings and the statistics reveal that for the same cause of action either more than one writ petition is pending or consequently from an order or a direction in a particular petition more than one contempt application or petition may also be pending, but in another Court. Rather than explain this phenomena of a confusing situation of duplicated proceedings, the Court will reproduce its orders in a certain writ petition. These orders were passed by this Court :

(2.) BUT , to be fair, it must be placed on record at the outset that this court was not the first to notice that in the management of the civil contempt cases filed at the High Court, instead of the cases following the routine or the normal course of seeing a decision, are being bogged down in pendency as the main case is being braked by a contempt petition where the same parties as in the main case have to be served all over again in a contempt case. This aspect delays the main case itself, and also the contempt case by unnecessarily serving parties who are otherwise present and aware of the proceedings in one division of the Court where the case is, but pretend that they have no notice in another where the contempt proceedings are pending.

(3.) THE Committee, apparently, never took-off was beyond the circulation, so made by the registry, the file which constituted the committee went to sleep in the deep freeze. While the file sleeps effectively, in between one Hon'ble member left as Chief Justice to another State. The other (one of us) remains awaiting an exercise for the committee to move.