Pairokar

                        By Parmanand Pandey     My colleague Shripal Singh and I have been regularly campaigning for the live streaming of the court proceedings. I have written copiously on it in my blog’ Life and Law’ as well as on my website’ Judicial Panorama’. Fortunately, a good beginning of live streaming of three Constitution Benches has been made from today i.e., 27 th of September 2022. The decision to video-record the court proceedings was taken in November 2017 by the bench headed by the then CJI Dipak Misra. It was then directed by it that the proceedings of two courts in every district of the country would be video recorded. In the first week of 2018, again the bench consisting of the then CJI, Dipak Misra, Justice A.M. Khanwilkar and Justice D.Y. Chandrachud gave a verdict that the live telecasting of the court proceedings would begin from the court of the Chief Justice of India itself. ...

  The Government of Jammu and Kashmir must be congratulated for two bold recent decisions after the abrogation of Articles 370 and 35 A from the Constitution of India. One is to make Hindi the official language of the state apart from Urdu and the second is to grant voting rights to nearly 25 lakh people, who have been living there for decades together but were deprived of their legitimate rights.    This gerrymandering and the delimitation of the state along with the new electoral rolls will go a long way in the integration of Jammu and Kashmir with the rest of India. Was it not an insult to lakhs of refugees who came from Pakistan and settled down in Jammu and Kashmir but were denied voting rights? So much so, that thousands of Valmikis, who gave everything in the service of J@K for generations did not have voting rights for 75 years. Sikhs, who came from the western side of the border and were domiciled in the state yet were denied their voting rights. ...

 Going through the popular column of journalist Vivek Shukla ‘Dilli dil se’ in a Hindi daily of Delhi provides enormous profit and immense pleasure. It is simply engrossing and enlightening. His pen portraits of the historical places and the history of Delhi leave an indelible mark on the mind. It is the simplest way of recounting history. However, the stories of the monumental tragedy of the partition of India in 1947 grip any reader with extreme sadness, agony, anguish, and anger. Partition of India of India, without doubt, was the most incredible human catastrophe in which lakhs were killed, millions were uprooted, and properties worth billions were destroyed. The biggest onslaught was faced by women who were raped, ravished, and killed by devils.  ‘Train to Pakistan’ by Khushwant Singh and ‘Jhhotha Sach’ of legendry Yashpal or ‘Tamas’ of Bhishma Sahni has given a vivid picture of death and destruction that was caused by the division of our motherland.  It is true th...

  The credit for coining the words like ‘Rashtrapati’, ‘Shri’ and ‘Shrimati’ for the ‘President of India’, ‘Mr’ and ‘Mrs’ go to famous Hindi journalist Pandit Baba Baburao Vishnu Paradkar when he was the editor of the daily Aaj of Varanasi. Hindi journalism has produced six great editors- Baburao Vishnu Paradkar, Rajaram Khadilkar, Lakshman Narain Garde, Ambika Prasad Vajpayee, Pandit Kamla Pati Tripathi and Vidyabhaskar. Pandit Kamlapati Tripathi later left journalism to become an active politician. This group was later known as ‘Five Greats of Hindi journalism. Incidentally, all of them had their roots in Kashi and some association with Calcutta. The first three of them were Marathi speaking and the last one Pandit Vidyabhaskar was Telugu speaking. Only Ambika Prasad Vajpayee and Pt Kamla Pati Tripathi belonged to the Hindi heartland. It must be mentioned here that Hindi journalism was born in Calcutta, and it was from here Pandit Jugal Kishore Shukla brought out ‘Udant Martand’,...

     My friend Ravindra Nath Tripathi, an Advocate practising in the courts of Azamgarh has sent me an invite to the annual conference of Uttar Bharat Darshan Parishad, which is being organised on the campus of the prestigious Children College and Schools of Azamgarh. In a way, it is the most appropriate place to hold this annual conference. This conference will impel the new generation of students to develop and broaden the horizon of their rational thinking. It is situated a few kilometres away from the din and bustle of the town in a tranquil ambience of the village Belaisa. It is being held for three days from 15 th to 17 th July. Azamgarh is the land of Rishi Duravasa. A village named after Rishi Durvasa is located on the confluence of rivers-Tamsa and Majhui and it has acquired the status of a pious pilgrim centre, where people from far-off places assemble for three days in the month Kartik for holy dips in the Sangam.      Azamgarh has bee...

Lord Atkin has said ‘justice is not a cloistered virtue, she must be allowed to suffer the scrutiny and respectful, even though outspoken, comments of ordinary men. That is why the oral observations of the Supreme Court in Nupur Sharma’s Transfer Petition must be allowed to be freely commented upon by the public. In fact, the observations are not only uncalled for and unwarranted but highly disturbing. If the Supreme Court was so troubled with what Nupur Sharma had said in the heat of a TV debate, it should have been recorded in the order sheet but the SC rather preferred to lecture orally on her conduct. This obiter dicta comment ought to have been avoided by the judges because it will adversely affect Nupur Sharma in getting justice. Although obiter dicta are legally not binding on the courts below, it will certainly be cited to persuade and prejudice the mind of judges of lower court judges. A transfer petition is normally filed by the litigants for transferring the case from one...

Sometimes extraordinary measures need to be adopted to deal with an extraordinary situation. The manner in which the peace was being hijacked by some rioters in different places of Uttar Pradesh after the Friday prayers in mosques was highly disturbing for the common people. There could be no room for any doubt that it was being planned by some and executed by namazis. Yogi government has restored the peace sooner than it was expected by administering the ‘bulldozer medicine’. The preliminary revelations have made it clear that the vicious radical PFI has been responsible for the state-wide trouble. But what is more troublesome is the letter of some former judges of the Supreme Court and the High Courts and some advocates to the Chief Justice of India requesting him to take suo motu cognizance of the use of bulldozers to stop the razing of the houses of the rioters. As far as the identification of culprits is concerned, nobody is expected to know better than them that real culprits m...