The High Court of Karnataka has held that the plea of ISKCON, Bengaluru, for recusal of Justice K.L. Manjunath from hearing its case did not amount to contempt of court as such a plea was made after the judge made some adverse remarks against the temple and the deity.
Dropping the contempt proceedings initiated suo motu on the recommendation of a Bench headed by Mr. Justice Manjunath in 2009 against Jai Chaitanya Dasa, secretary, ISKCON, Bengaluru, the court said on Thursday that Mr. Dasa had no intention of scandalising the court or interfering with the administration of justice.
235-page verdict
In its 235-page verdict, a Division Bench comprising Justice N. Kumar and Justice Rathnakala held that Mr. Dasa had sought for recusal of Mr. Justice Manjunath only because of the “utterances” of the judge that was widely reported in the newspapers.
Mr. Justice Manjunath had observed that “he used to visit the temple [ISKCON] as a devotee till 2003, and stopped thereafter due to several doubts. This should not happen to the innocent devotees visiting the temple...” after he got an envelope, containing his photo taken at ISKCON during 2003, when he was hearing a case of civil dispute between to factions of ISKCON — Bengaluru and Mumbai.
Also, Mr. Justice Manjunath had said, “I stopped visiting ISKCON since I was not getting devotion considering the appearance of the statue of the deity and not for any other reason …,” the Bench noticed.
The court also dropped contempt proceedings against Ramesh Babu and S.A. Maruthi Prasad, both advocates, who faced the allegation that they had approached two former advocate-colleagues of Mr. Justice Manjunath before he was elevated as judge, to ensure that he [Mr. Justice Manjunath] could not hear the case between the two factions.
One Shekhar Shetty, with whom Mr. Justice Manjunath worked as a junior, and S.V. Srinivasan, former colleague of the judge, had written letters to Mr. Justice Manjunath about Mr. Prasad and Mr. Babu.
However, the Bench said that two former colleagues of Mr. Justice Manjunath wanted to “implicate these to advocates”, without any justification and that speaks of professional jealousy and “apparently the learned judge [Mr. Justice Manjunath] could not see through the game and unnecessarily, he was caught in the web.”
‘A private matter’
“In the entire episode, no scandalous attack is made on any judges or judiciary, in discharging their judicial function. It is purely a private matter between the learned judge, who was a devotee of the private temple, its factions, and the advocates representing those factions,” the Bench ruled.
