The Madras High Court has held that suo motu contempt of court proceedings initiated against Inspector General of Police N.K. Senthamarai Kannan, now Member Secretary of Tamil Nadu Uniformed Services Recruitment Board (TNUSRB), for reportedly filing a bogus document in court to win a case, could be heard only by a Division Bench and not a single judge.
Disposing of an appeal preferred by him, Justices N. Kirubakaran and P. Velmurugan concurred with senior counsel AR.L. Sundaresan that since the proceedings, initiated by Justice S.M. Subramaniam in April, were in the nature of criminal contempt, they must be heard only by a Bench comprising two judges. The order passed by the judges on the appeal read: “Generally, in the case of civil contempts (related to disobedience of court orders), the matter would be decided by the very same judge who passes the order which is said to have been violated as the same judge alone would be in a better position to appreciate the facts of the case.
“However, since this matter happens to be a criminal contempt proceedings, the same has to be dealt with by a Division Bench in which honourable Mr. Justice S.M. Subramaniam is a member or any other Division Bench to be constituted by Our Lord, the honourable Acting Chief Justice (Vineet Kothari).”
The single judge initially initiated the contempt proceedings against the incumbent Director General of Police (Law and Order) J.K. Tripathy, since he was the chairman of TNUSRB when the incident of submission of a bogus document in the court occurred. His name was subsequently dropped.
Acceding to a request made by Advocate General Vijay Narayan and Additional Advocate General P.H. Arvindh Pandian, the judge substituted Mr. Senthamarai Kannan in the place of Mr. Tripathy. The change was carried out after the law officers convinced him that the chairman had absolutely no role to play in submission of the bogus document.
The issue relates to a writ petition filed by a Grade II constable S. Arunachalam challenging TNUSRB’s failure to award him marks for the answer he gave in the written examination held for the post of Sub Inspector of Police (Fingerprint). The plea was dismissed on March 13 on the basis of an “expert opinion” obtained by TNUSRB from “a IIT-Madras professor” named D. Moorthy. However, after the dismissal, the constable filed an application under the Right to Information Act of 2005 and found out that no professor by name Moorthy had ever served in the mathematics department of IIT-M.
Immediately, he reported the matter to the court where the TNUSRB officials claimed that their “consultant” G.V. Kumar and his acquaintance D. Moorthy, a retired maths teacher of Kendriya Vidyalaya school situated on IIT-M campus, had impersonated and that the officials of the board had no role to play in the fraud.
The board also informed the court that Central Crime Branch (CCB) police had booked a case against the duo on charges of cheating and impersonation. However, dissatisfied with the submissions, the judge had initiated suo motu contempt proceedings and directed the Commissioner of Police, Greater Chennai to bring the real culprits to book.
