Expressing displeasure at the tardy progress of the CBI inquiry into the cases booked against individuals who allegedly waged a vitriolic campaign against High Court Judges and the judiciary, Andhra Pradesh High Court Chief Justice Prashant Kumar Mishra questioned if the country’s premier investigating agency was disinterested or incapable of bringing the culprits to justice.
He directed the CBI to file an affidavit giving details of the outcome of the investigation, which it claimed to have done in the last one year purportedly with the support of agencies like the Interpol.
“You seem to be negligent in acting against the persons who are bringing disrepute to the judiciary, in cases where the High Court itself is a petitioner. What then will be the fate of the common citizen under such circumstances? Let us not be under the impression that you people are either lying or simply passing the buck by citing technicalities. If you can’t identify and trace the accused, make a mention of the same,” the Chief Justice fumed at CBI counsel P. Subhash and the CBI SP who appeared before the Division Bench virtually.
Friday’s hearing of the cases of abuse of judges, by a Division Bench comprising the Chief Justice and Justice Kanneganti Lalitha, revolved around the maze of controls of the Social Media Intermediaries (SMI) namely Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp, YouTube etc. (whether their parent entities headquartered abroad, mostly in the U.S., can deal with the complaints lodged in India or their local arms have a certain degree of autonomy in dealing with the malicious content and the procedures), the dynamics thereof involving the creation of fake accounts, the difficulty in zeroing in on the culprits using the URL (Uniform Resource Locators), the availability of metadata as opposed basic subscriber data, photo DNA technology, the SMI Rules-2021 etc.
High Court standing counsel Aswini Kumar said these cases needed to be taken seriously as at stake was not only the image of the judiciary but also the reputation and rights of citizens of the entire country.
