Oct. 31: Bengal’s seat of power today heard words that evoked disbelief not because of their content but because of their origin. “It is crystal clear that IO (investigating officer) Dhrubajyoti Dutta picked up Ali Jinnah from the police lock-up and made papers to the effect that he was arrested from his home. It is a misconduct and false statement.” “This court strictly recommends direct suspension of the IO from his present post of sub-inspector at Parui police station….” “At this stage, it is not possible to find out whether the OC was sleeping at the time or not. So, the SP is recommended to conduct an in-depth inquiry into the role of the OC by someone not below the rank of a DSP.” “The SP is also recommended to remove the OC from Parui police station at once.” The merciless hammer was being wielded not by a judge in the high court —where the Mamata Banerjee administration has been nursing one bloody nose after another of late. The chief judicial magistrate at Suri in Birbhum, a district that has emerged as a political battlefield, delivered the recommendations today. The judge was dealing with apparent deceit by the police which produced Ali Jinnah, believed to be a Trinamul supporter and already arrested in a murder case, as a suspect in another case of attack on cops after claiming that he was arrested on Wednesday night when he was actually in police custody. The same court had sent Jinnah to police custody on Tuesday and to judicial custody on Thursday when the police “mistake” was discovered. The judge had yesterday demolished the police’s attempt to pass off subterfuge as a “mistake” by telling the law-enforcers: “If you add two and two and get six, then it is a mistake. But in this case, you are saying that two plus two is equal to Shakespeare.” The judge, Indranil Chatterjee, was as unsparing today (see chart). He recommended that the police misconduct be referred to the high court. Such recommendations — and withering observations —are not common in lower courts. Probably because of the decades-old record of political interference in almost every institution in most of Bengal, an impression had gathered ground that the government of the day need not lose sleep over possible outcomes in lower courts. The administration’s cocoon of cockiness — articulated by the audacious police attempt to lie to the court about Jinnah’s arrest — was ripped apart in the Suri courtroom over the last two days. The court’s recommendations surprised both the state administration and the legal fraternity. “In my professional career spanning over 50 years, I cannot recollect another instance of a lower court judge passing such an order. The CJM should be complimented for using the provisions of law,” said Gitanath Ganguli, a senior lawyer in Calcutta. The question that was doing the rounds among administrative circles was whether the developments in the court reflect a perceived widespread disquiet at the drift in governance. The morale among officials is already said to be low and some senior officers have been trying to get around political obstacles by asking the police to uphold the law. But such nudges have so far been confined to a handful of instances. Some of the officials had been emboldened by the orders given by Calcutta High Court in the recent past. Several high court judges had criticised the role of the administration in cases against Birbhum Trinamul chief Anubrata Mondal and Trinamul MP Tapas Paul. The blow from the Birbhum court was unexpected and caught the legal team unawares, admitted a government-empanelled lawyer. “Senior government lawyers have opined that the CJM’s order should be challenged in a higher court. But we are yet to take the final call,” said the lawyer. The inability of the police to act on their own was in evidence today when Zafarul Islam, a Trinamul leader who figures in the FIR related to the same murder case in which Jinnah is an accused, turned up at the circuit house in Bolpur to attend a meeting with the party’s all-India general secretary Mukul Roy. The 15-odd policemen on duty at the circuit house did not make any attempt to arrest Zafarul. Besides Mukul, Anubrata and Manirul Islam, a controversial MLA, were also at the circuit house. A police officer said: “We saw Zafarul and we knew he was an accused in a murder case in Makhra. But how can we arrest him? No such instruction was issued to us.”
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