Prashant Bhushan is a prominent Public Interest and Civil Rights Lawyer at the Supreme Court of India. He is also one of the founding members of Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), and is making the news in this pandemic.
Prashant Bhushan, born on 15th October 1956, is the oldest son of the former Law Minister, Shanti Bhusan. Shanti Bhushan was the law minister in Morarji Desai’s government. When the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s election case was being heard by the court, Prashant’s father was the lawyer for the petitioner Raj Narain. This afforded Prashant the unique opportunity of being able to attend the session. Inspired by the high profile case, he wrote his first book “The Case That Shook India” in 1978 when he was just a student. His second book was published in the year 1990, on the Bofors scandal. The title of the book was “Bofors, the Selling of a Nation”.
He joined IIT-Madras but dropped out after one semester. Instead, he decided to pursue a two-year BSc programme with Philosophy, Economics and Political Science. Later on, he decided to pursue his higher studies in Philosophy for which he went to Princeton University. However, he didn’t complete it and returned to India instead. After this, he started his career as a lawyer in 1983.
Bhushan is well known in relation to the various PILs filed by him against corruption and human rights violations. Since the year 1998, he has been actively involved in campaigning for judicial accountability in the apex court. During that time, along with his father and a few other lawyers, he formed the Committee on Judicial Accountability to ensure transparency in the higher judiciary. The Committee successfully prepared a charge sheet to impeach Justice MM Punchhi and were able to obtain signatures of 25 Rajya Sabha MPs. But the case was deemed inactive and moot because Justice Punchhi was appointed CJI. Prashant, however, was successful in the impeachment motion in Parliament against Justice PD Dinakaran, which subsequently led to his resignation in 2011.
Despite his father being a cabinet member in the Morarji Desai government, he kept himself away from politics until 2012. In 2012 he was one of the founding members of Aam Aadmi Party.
500 PILs
Till date, Mr Bhusan has filled 500 PILs over three decades of him as a lawyer of which quite a few are noticeable. One of them was in 1983, when a well-known environmental activist Vandana Shiva approached him for the Doon Valley mining case. This was his first PIL.
A year later, he fought for the victims of the Anti-Sikh riots in Delhi. He also joined the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL). Since 1984, Bhushan has tried to always reach out and take up the cases of the poor and marginalised, pro bono. In 1988, it was for the first time that the compensation case filed by the victims of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy reached the Supreme Court. At this time, Bhushan was there to offer his services as a lawyer to them. His PILs were a pain for the UPA government.
PILs such as those on the Radia tapes, Coalgate scam, 2G Spectrum scam, the appointment of PJ Thomas as the Chief Vigilance Commissioner, and against the ambitious nuclear programme of Dr Manmohan Singh government seeking to fix accountability of the suppliers for the Kudankulam nuclear plant in Tamil Nadu were also filed by him, which made him notoriously famous in political and judicial circles.
Supreme Court vs Bhushan
While Bhushan is one of the leading lawyers in the country, he is also one of the lawyers who have faced heat from the judiciary. The noted advocate was held guilty of contempt of court on August 14 relating to the tweets made by him against the Chief Justice of India SA Bobde and past four CJI’s. Contempt of Court means the act by a person who does not follow or obey an order that is passed by the honourable court or in other words, the lack of respect shown for a judge or a court. The Apex Court found that the tweets made by Bhushan were based on distorted facts and amounted to a scurrilous and malicious attack on the SC, which also destabilized the functioning of the judiciary. The noted lawyer was then found guilty and sentenced to a fine of Rs.1, defaulting on which would lead to imprisonment of three months and a ban on practice as a lawyer for three years. The decision was pronounced by a five-judge bench headed by Justice Arun Mishra.
Justice Mishra also highlighted that while the matter was sub judice, Bhushan shared his statements given to the court in media and gave interviews which also brought down the dignity of the court. Before sentencing Bhushan in the case, the court had given him three chances to apologise to the honourable court for causing contempt but Bhushan, through his statements, stood by his tweets and did not appeal for mercy from the court. Bhushan stated that apologising would mean a “contempt of his conscience” as his tweets were solely based on bona fide intentions. He wished for them to be seen as a constructive criticism of the court, and a means of keeping the court mindful of its duties so that it does not drift away from being the custodian of the constitution and people’s rights. There is another contempt proceeding going on against Bhushan before the same bench for his 2009 interview wherein he said half of the past 16 CJI’s were corrupt.
Authors’ Take
The decision to convict one of the leading human rights lawyers in India for his tweets could have a strong dissatisfaction on the exercise of the fundamental right to free speech and expression. To this, the authors feel that the contempt decision might be overboard keeping in mind the fundamental rights guaranteed by the Constitution, and the fact that criminal contempt was kept to a bare minimum in the tweets. While certain limitations do exist on the right to freedom of speech and expression, discussions involving the role of the judiciary, access to justice, and democracy must be given widest possible scope in terms of exercising that freedom.
References:
- https://www.timesnownews.com/india/article/prashant-bhushan-contempt-case-here-s-what-happened-in-sc/645378
- https://www.thequint.com/voices/opinion/prashant-bhushan-supreme-court-chief-justices-public-interest-litigations-transparency-in-judiciary
- https://www.outlookindia.com/blog/story/who-is-prashant-bhushan/2478
Contributors:
- Muskaan Vijay
- Vijay Parekh