SC initiates suo motu contempt proceedings against Prashant Bhushan

NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court has initiated suo motu criminal contempt proceedings against activist advocate Prashant Bhushan for accusing the past four Chief Justices of India of playing a role in “destruction of democracy” during an “undeclared Emergency during the last six years”.
The SC has also taken adverse note of Bhushan’s tweets accusing CJI S A Bobde of closing the SC during the lockdown and denying people their fundamental right to access to justice. His critical tweet was made after photographs showed the CJI sitting on a parked Harley Davidson motorbike in Nagpur last month. A bench of Justices Arun Mishra, B R Gavai and Krishna Murari is scheduled to take up the suo motu criminal contempt petition against Bhushan on Wednesday.
On June 27, Bhushan had tweeted at 8.25am: “When historians in future look back at the last six years to see how democracy has been destroyed in India even without a formal Emergency, they will particularly mark the role of the Supreme Court in this destruction, and more particularly the role of the last four CJIs.”
What the court appears to have taken objection to is the statement that the CJI has kept the SC in lockdown mode when in reality, the court was hearing cases, both fresh and pending, regularly through video conferencing.
Interestingly, the same bench is also scheduled to hear on Wednesday contempt proceedings drawn by the SC in 2010 against Bhushan for his interview to Tehelka magazine alleging that half of the 16 former CJIs were corrupt.