A COMEDIAN, A JOURNALIST AND THE COURTS : A COMPLICATED RELATIONSHIP
First of all, if you are not aware of Kunal Kamra, he is a Bombay based stand-up comedian who predominantly cracks jokes on politicians. On 11th of November 2020 when Supreme Court of India had granted interim bail to a renown journalist, Kunal Kamra posted a series of derogatory tweets on twitter against the Supreme Court and the Chief Justice of India. This resulted in an outcry among the law students and lawyers’ fraternity and many of them filed contempt petitions against him. In response to which the Attorney general of India K K Venugopal has given his consent for criminal contempt of court proceedings. However Kamra did not wan to apologise for any of his tweets.
What is contempt of court?
When a person is being disobedient or disrespectful towards a court of law and its officers in a way that opposes or defies the authority, justice and dignity of the court, it amounts to contempt or court. It’s basically a legal mechanism that punishes the ones who tend to lower its authority. There are two types of contempt : (i) Civil Contempt of court (ii) Criminal Contempt of court. A civil contempt of court is a wilful disobedience to any judgement, decree, direction, order, writ or other process of a court or wilful breach of an undertaking given by the court. On the other hand, Any publication weather by words, spoken or written, or by signs, or by visible representation, or otherwise of any matter or the doing of any other act which scandalises/tend to scandalise, lowers/tend to lower the authority of any court, prejudices/ tends to prejudice or interfere with the due course of any judicial proceedings, obstruct/ tend to obstruct the administration of justice in any manner will lead to criminal contempt of court.
From the aforementioned definition although it is clear that Kunal Kamra has committed a Criminal contempt of court. Let’s look at the back story of this incident : Arnab Goswami was arrested by the Mumbai police on 4th November 2020 on a charge of abetting the suicide of Anvay Naik. He was remanded to judicial custody. Later, he went to Bombay high court (BHC) and moved a writ petition for ‘Habeas corpus’ which was completely unnecessary since that will only be applied to detention without cover of law. Instead he should have moved to sessions court for bail and then come to high court if he were unsuccessful. Nevertheless his bail was denied in BHC due to which he moved to Supreme Court on 11th of November 2020. There, he was granted interim bail and by evening he was a free man. During the judgement, justice Chandrachud asked “If we as constitutional court do not lay down law and protect liberty then who will?” He also said “If this court does not interfere today, we are travelling on the path of destruction. Forget this man (Arnab) you may not like his ideology. Left to myself. I will not watch his channel. We are seeing case after case. HCs are failing to exercise jurisdiction. people are in jail for tweets!”. Ironically when it comes to Kamra’s tweets, the logic of ‘If you don’t like it, then dont see it’ doesn’t apply to them. Moreover, on one side, a journalist is getting speedy justice on a holiday from the Supreme Court, where as the same Supreme Court postpones the hearings of Varavara Rao poet aged 80 who is suffering from neurological and urological health issues, Sudha Bharadwaj (59) who suffers from hyper tension, heart disease and diabetes and Stan swamy (83) suffering from abdominal pain & multiple falls in jail who cant even hold a glass because of Parkinson’s disease. His plea to use a sipper in jail has been adjourned by three weeks!
How are these people different from a journalist? This seems as if some citizens are more equal than others in this country. The Supreme Court of the country is the guardian of the constitution. One must hold it in high regards. Nevertheless, I believe that it is ‘okay’ to criticise the institution if there is a genuine reason behind it. If a mere comedian’s tweets are bothering a 70 year old Constitutional institution, then it is high time that it requires reforms in its contempt law. because there are lot more important cases pending in the Supreme Court that demands speedy delivery for justice.
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