Pairokar

Live-Streaming of Court Proceedings is a Welcome Step                                                                  Live- streaming of court proceedings is a momentous and laudable decision of the Supreme Court of India. This will, without doubt, bring about transparency in the courts. Incidentally, the first step in this direction was taken in November 2017, when the bench headed by the CJI Dipak Misra directed that the proceedings of two courts in every district of the country would be video recorded. Now in the first week of July this year a bench consisting of the CJI, Dipak Misra, Justice A.M. Khanwilkar and Justice D.Y. Chandrachud handed down an earth-shattering decision for the live telecasting of the court proceedings and the beginning will be made from the court of the Chief Justice itself. There are ...

How can a scientist, a philosopher, an intellectual be prefixed with the community that he or she belongs to? When we say a Muslim/ Hindu/Christian scholar it connotes that the person has the depth only in that particular religion. It is an oxymoron- a contradiction in terms. But when a person is called a historian, then he/she cannot be branded as a Hindu/ Muslim or Christian historian. That is why, it was shocking to know that the Congress President Rahul Gandhi recently met Muslim historians, journalists, economists and intellectuals.  As a matter of fact, it is the so-called intellectuals of the Muslim community who themselves should have objected to being prefixed with the word Muslim because that makes them narrow-minded. They cannot even pretend to be intellectuals. Their shameless behaviour has totally exposed them that they have been working more on communal lines than indulging into any dispassionate intellectual exercise. If Rahul Gandhi met them for seeking their ad...

Caesar’s wife must be above board but what would you say when the judge pronounces the judgement without hearing the arguments? This is what has happened L'affaire Tanvi Seth. By releasing the report of the so-called enquiry after fifteen days after the incident, the External Affairs Ministry has not inspired any confidence in the public. The report has held the passport official of Lucknow guilty of misbehaving and asking irrelevant questions from her, but it leaves many questions unanswered. It may be recalled that hurt by the searching questions of the passport officer regarding her different names and different addresses, the passport seeker Tanvi Seth twitted to the External Affairs Minister Ms Sushma Swaraj, who immediately swung into action and virtually in a jiffy took two decisions. One; the lady concerned was called the next day and the passport officer handed over her passport and apologized for the alleged misbehaviour of the official. And the second was that ...

Can anyone be converted from one religion to the other within five minutes of heated exchange of words? This is well-nigh impossible, but it is what a couple Tanvi Seth and her husband Anas Siddiqui make us believe, that too, after 12 years of their marriage. The lady Tanvi Seth has alleged that an official of the Lucknow’s Regional Passport Office has humiliated her by asking humiliating questions about her Hindu name and wanted her husband to Hinduism. Anybody will say in the first blush that it is not only absurd but also smacks of the blackmailing by the lady and her husband.  Lo and behold! what is even more disturbing is that within 24 hours of her raising the communal hue and cry, the Passport Officer called the couple, offered them tea and handed over her passport with all humility and respect. This has been done because she tweeted the External Affairs Minister narrating the story of her predicament. But if there is even a shred of truth in what she has told about the iss...

Former High Court Judge Abhay Mahadeo Thipsay has joined the Congress party within a year of his retirement. Had Justice Thipsay been a non-descript judge, the  eyebrows would not have been raised. During his judgeship, he had handled many high-profile cases, but the pattern of his judgements was almost the same and similar. Most of the cases decided by him have thrown him in the bad light as they indicate towards his unethical conduct, the perversity of thought process and skewed mentality. The track record of his judgments conclusively proves that the Judge has been hostile to a particular Political Party and its leaders. He used all tools in his armoury to give farfetched logic in his orders to embarrass that Party and its dispensation in Gujrat. Now when he has joined the Congress Party, the apprehensions get substantiated and fortified. In the Shohrabuddin encounter case, he jailed Amit Shah, the present BJP president. While granting bail to Gujrat police officers DG Vanjara ...

Babu Rajendra Prasad, after his retirement as the distinguished President of India for ten years, moved from the comforts of Delhi to Sadaqat Ashram in Patna. In his footsteps, the next President of India Dr S. Radhakrishnan also moved away from Delhi to live in Madras. The late Morarji Desai shifted to a two bedroom house in Mumbai, thanks to Sharad Pawar, the then Chief Minister of Maharashtra, who got that small house allotted in his name in the category of the freedom fighters as he had no other place to live anywhere in India. Gulzari Lal Nanda, a freedom fighter, two times Interim Prime Minister of India and the founder of the INTUC, died at the ripe age of hundred in Ahmedabad always lived a Spartan life. Contrast their ‘simple living and high thinking’, who made sterling contributions during the freedom struggle, to modern leaders like; Mulayam Singh Yadav, Mayawati and Lalu Prasad Yadav. Before demitting their offices, they got allotted big bungalows in the posh areas. Now wh...

The Supreme Court of India is beset with galore of controversies. At the beginning of this year, four of its senior most judges- Jasti Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, Madan B. Lokur and Kurian Joseph- held a Press Conference saying that ‘all is not well’ in the Supreme Court of India. This triggered the opposition parties to move for the impeachment of the Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra. However, the impeachment proceedings could not be carried forward because the entire last session of both houses was washed out due to the ruckus and pandemonium inside the house by one or the other opposition party. Thereafter two of its judges sent missives to the CJI requesting him to take immediate measures to set right the Court’s functioning. Adding fuel to fire the former Law Minister and very senior advocate Shanti Bhushan and his son Prashant Bhushan, also a celebrated advocate, filed Public Interest Litigation in the Supreme Court for the constitution a five-judge bench to decide as to whi...