Chief Justice of India D Y Chandrachud on Thursday recused from hearing petitions seeking contempt of court action against stand-up comedian Kunal Kamra over some of his tweets.
“Let the matter be listed before a bench of which I am not a member,” the CJI said as soon as the matter came up before the bench comprising him and Justice P S Narasimha.
Although the counsel said they had no problem if he heard it, the CJI refused, saying, “No, the comments were made on the order, which I have passed.”
The reference apparently was to a tweet made by Kamra in the wake of the November 2020 Supreme Court order granting bail to Republic TV editor-in-chief Arnab Goswami, who had challenged the Bombay High Court order rejecting his interim bail plea in the 2018 Anway Naik abetment-to-suicide case.
The court is seized of a batch of pleas seeking action against Kamra, including one by law student Shrirang Katneshwarkar who contended that these tweets “scandalised” the top court and “further lowered” its authority.
Under Section 15 of The Contempt of Courts Act, 1971, the consent of the Attorney General or Solicitor General is necessary to initiate contempt proceedings against a person. Accordingly, the petitioners had earlier approached Attorney General K K Venugopal who gave his permission for the same.
Granting consent, Venugopal had said the tweets “are not only in bad taste but clearly cross the line between humour and contempt of the court”.
“I find that today people believe that they can boldly and brazenly condemn the Supreme Court of India and its judges by exercising what they believe is their freedom of speech. But under the Constitution, the freedom of speech is subject to the law of contempt and I believe that it is time that people understand that attacking the Supreme Court of India unjustifiedly and brazenly will attract punishment under the Contempt of Courts Act, 1972,” he said.
The top court had issued notice to Kamra in the matter on December 18, 2020. In his reply, Kamra told the court that his “tweets were not published with intention of diminishing people’s faith in the highest court of our democracy” and that “the public’s faith in the judiciary is founded on the institution’s own actions and not on any criticism or commentary about it”.
He also said that “just as the Supreme Court values the faith the public places in it (and seeks to protect it by the exercise of its criminal contempt jurisdiction), it should also trust the public not to form its opinions of the court on the basis of a few jokes on Twitter”.
