New Delhi: After the Supreme Court on Friday issued suo motu contempt notice to its former judge Markandey Katju, the latter launched a personal attack on the bench in a series of tweets calling the decision the result of a “pre-arranged drama”.
Slamming the bench’s decision to issue him a contempt notice, Katju wrote, “In India too, this rule of judicial ‘omerta’ applies. I have been speaking against judicial corruption at the higher levels for long. For long I have been speaking out against the misdeeds of Dattu, Thakur, Anil Dave, and their ilk. As a result I have been ostracised.”
Alleging that the bench, comprising of Justices Ranjan Gogoi, P C Pant and Uday U Lalit, was playing out a “shameless”, pre-orchestrated “drama” in court, Katju wrote, “My guess about the event yesterday is that a ‘surgical strike’ was pre-planned by Thakur, Dave etc in cahoots with Gogoi to humiliate me and issue a contempt of court notice to me in order to silence me, & also give a warning to others not to speak out about the misdeeds of judges.”
The bench had issued the notice to Katju for writing blogs that the court called “an assault on the judges”, a first in the country’s judicial history, after he criticised the September 15 judgment that had set aside the death penalty for the convict in Kerala’s Soumya rape-cum-murder case.
