New Delhi: Even on the last day of his judicial career, Meghalaya high court judge Sudip Ranjan Sen ensured that he remained the talking point with yet another controversial judgment.
On Friday, in his last order before retirement, Sen, as part of a two-member divisional bench that also had chief justice M.Y. Mir, held The Shillong Times editor Patricia Mukhim and publisher Shobha Chaudhuri guilty of contempt for publishing two articles in their news daily.
The high court observed that the two articles in the Northeast paper were derogatory to the “administration of justice” and imposed a fine of Rs 2 lakh each on Mukhim and Chaudhuri.
The first article appeared in The Shillong Times on 10 December and was based on Sen’s earlier order seeking better facilities for retired judges and their families. The second article allegedly said that Sen “should be impeached” for his 13 December judgment where he had said that India “should have been declared a Hindu country” at Independence.
Ironically, passed on the International Women’s Day, the order said the two will be sent to jail for six months and the daily will be “banned” if they fail to pay up the fine within a week.
After the judgment was announced Friday, Mukhim issued a statement saying the order is “meant to deliver a chilling effect on us and media persons in general”. She refused to comment on her next course of action.
ThePrint reached Sen for comment but there was no response till the time of publishing this report.
Now that he has stoked another controversy with his last judgment, ThePrint revisits its 24 December profile of the now-retired judge where his contemporaries and juniors at the high court spoke about him after a string of controversial remarks earlier last year.
The article was published under the title, “Decoding Justice Sen – story of Meghalaya judge who said India should’ve been Hindu nation”.
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‘Hindu nation’
Depending on whom you ask in Shillong, queries on the controversial judge of the Meghalaya high court, Justice Sen, draw strong reactions.
The judge was in the news for a string of judgments and observations, particularly the one on 13 December, in which he said India “should have been declared a Hindu country” at Independence and he was confident that “only this government under PM Narendra Modi” would stop the country from becoming an Islamic state.
Following an uproar, Sen issued a clarification acknowledging secularism as being part of the basic structure of the Constitution. He also said that his judgment was not “politically motivated”.
But even before the row could die down, the judge was back in the news after he slapped a show-cause notice on The Shillong Times editor Patricia Mukhim and ordered her to be present in court. Her paper had carried an article on one of Sen’s orders seeking better facilities for retired judges and their families.
According to this report, Sen had allegedly chided Mukhim, even asking her, “What is your qualification, madam, to write about judges?” The report added that Sen was “visibly indignant” as he kept attacking Mukhim over her credentials.
Lawyers practising in the court, however, weren’t surprised by Sen’s reported outburst.
“There is a decorum that one has to follow,” a practicing lawyer in the Meghalaya High Court, who did not want to be named, said. “If a judge uses language that is rude or smacks of arrogance, it brings down the dignity of the court.”
An acquaintance of the judge said civil servants have borne the brunt of Sen’s actions as they are regularly hauled up by him for lax administration.
“In some instances, he has hauled up the administration in order to make things better,” the acquaintance said. “But at times, his behaviour is quite assertive, both inside and outside the court.”
‘Behaviour has changed in recent years’
Most of his contemporaries, colleagues as well as juniors ThePrint spoke to said that Sen’s behaviour changed in recent years.
Contemporaries of the judge who knew him from his days as an assistant public prosecutor at the district court way back in the ’90s said they were surprised to see him make headlines.
“There was nothing striking about his work,” said a senior advocate who has known Sen from his early days as a lawyer.
“It came as a surprise to most of us when we recently saw him in the front page of every newspaper,” a second senior advocate said on condition of anonymity.
However, many of his colleagues said that they observed a certain change in Sen’s behaviour. “He has become very impatient,” said a practicing lawyer in the high court. “There have been several instances of him shouting at complainants. Some bureaucrats have told me how they felt humiliated after appearing before him in court.”
He was not like this, the lawyer added: “He gets a bit carried away now.”
Those in the legal fraternity who knew him said that Sen never had too many friends. “He is a very serious kind of a person, doesn’t socialise too much,” an advocate who has known him for a while said on the condition that he not be named.
All, however, agreed on one aspect — Justice Sen, they said, has impeccable integrity.
“I can say without a doubt that Sen is very honest. He has never been involved in any financial corruption,” said a noted lawyer of Meghalaya High Court, who did not want to be named. “Fear and favour don’t work with him.”
R.G. Lyngdoh, who was Meghalaya’s home minister between 1998 and 2008, said the judicial system needs a person such as Justice Sen, who is willing to stand up for certain fundamental rights.
“But at the same time, the sanctity of the court has to be upheld. People who have been given the responsibility should not be allowed to misuse the authority,” he said.
The judgment that has raised eyebrows in the hill town
There was a consensus in the Meghalaya high court that Justice Sen went beyond his brief in making the “India should be a Hindu nation” observation. The judge was adjudicating on a writ petition filed by an Army recruit who was denied a domicile certificate by the Meghalaya government.
To make sense of what could have influenced Sen’s observation, his contemporaries in the legal fraternity and the government, who knew him since his early years, said that one has to go back in time to the late 1970s.
Sen, born and bought up in Shillong, is the son of Suresh Chandra Sen, who owned the first musical instrument shop there. Called “Mahalaxmi”, the shop, located in Police Bazaar, the hill city’s bustling commercial hub, still stands.
“Khasi-Bengali ethnic clashes had rocked the hill town. People were killed. Sen’s ancestral house in Mawprem was burnt down by miscreants during the anti-Bengali riots that broke out in Shillong in 1979,” one of his contemporaries said.
Sen feels strongly about how the Bengalis who left East Pakistan and settled in Shillong got displaced twice over. “This could have influenced his remark,” said a senior advocate who had known him for almost two decades.
Many old-timers in the city agreed with this. “It appears he carries a lot of baggage,” Lyngdoh said. “The incident has left a huge mark in his thinking, in his psyche. It appears he has not found closure for it.”
But there were others who felt that a judge should not get affected by past prejudices.
“It’s correct that his family got displaced. But judgment should proceed on the basis of law and law alone,” said the second senior advocate who knew Sen over the years. “As a judge one should not allow personal experiences to cloud your view. That is a failing on his part.”
G.S. Masser, president, Meghalaya High Court Bar Association, said, “We all like him but everybody has his weaknesses. We have to ignore it.”
According to Masser, some of the bar association members did not like Sen’s 13 December observation but were assuaged after his clarification.
“He does not show any side that is pro any religion or ideology. Probably, the observation he made was because of temporary loss of thought,” he said.
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Justice Sen’s orders so far, a mixed bag
Some of Justice Sen’s more recent orders raised eyebrows within the legal fraternity in Meghalaya.
In December last year, he directed private airlines such as IndiGo and SpiceJet to start immediate flight operations from Umroi airport, which is 30 km from Shillong. The Supreme Court stayed the order on 13 December.
Sen was also part of the court in 2014-15, which conferred the designation of senior advocate on Delhi-based lawyer Aman Sinha who did not practise in the Meghalaya high court at that time. Sinha was a BJP spokesperson who appeared regularly on TV channels.
“And, subsequently three more people were designated as senior advocates,” said one of the advocates quoted above. “There has been a lot of heartburn over this in the state’s legal fraternity. Subsequently, the conferment of the designation was challenged by the Meghalaya High Court Bar Association in the Supreme Court.”
His order, stripping powers of the tribal headmen in the state, led to an unexpected outcome. “It was a blessing in disguise. We had been pushing for granting constitutional status to the chieftains and headmen in Meghalaya,” said John F. Kharshiing, chairman, the Grand Council of Chiefs in Meghalaya. “The order has become a rallying point for the headmen to come together and demand that they are brought under a constitutional framework.”