The case between 2 judges of Calcutta HC reaches Supreme Court, bench of 5 judges will hear tomorrow

A five-judge bench of Chief Justice DY Chandrachud and Justice Sanjeev Khanna, Justice BR Gavai, Justice Surya Kant and Justice Aniruddha Bose will hear the case at 10.30 am on Saturday.

The Supreme Court has taken suo motu cognizance of the incidents that took place in the Calcutta High Court in the last two days. A strange case has come to light in the Calcutta High Court in which the order of the double bench of the High Court was ignored and the order was issued by the single bench. The case will now be heard in the top court of the country.

The single bench led by Justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay ignored the order of the double bench and accused Justice Soumen Sen, who was presiding over the double bench, of working for a political party in the state. Now this matter has come to the Supreme Court. A five-judge bench comprising Chief Justice DY Chandrachud and Justice Sanjeev Khanna, Justice BR Gavai, Justice Surya Kant and Justice Aniruddha Bose will hear the case tomorrow at 10.30 am on Saturday.

Admissions are being done with fake certificates

The issue arose from a petition in the Calcutta High Court alleging that caste certificates were being issued fraudulently in the state and that many people had obtained such certificates to gain admission to medical courses. On the morning of January 24 (Wednesday), Justice Gangopadhyay passed an order asking the West Bengal Police to hand over documents related to the case to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).

Minutes after the said order was passed, Advocate General Kishore Dutta mentioned the matter before the double bench of Justices Soumen Sen and Uday Kumar, and this bench stayed the single bench order on the same day.

Why was the decision of the single bench changed without appeal?

Justice Gangopadhyay then took up the matter again on the same day and ordered the AG to hand over the case papers to the CBI, insisting that he was not informed about the stay order passed by the double bench. The double bench heard the matter again on Thursday morning and quashed the order passed by Justice Gangopadhyay.

Actually, the matter did not end here. The single bench again took up the matter the next day, Thursday, January 25, and asked the AG as to which rule allows a double bench to stay a single bench order when there was no application for appeal.

It was recorded in the order that the AG submitted that he was not responsible to answer this question. Single Bench is a lower court than “Double Bench”. The single bench said that the double bench was in no hurry to stay its order, but Justice Sen was an interested party.