Karnataka HC drops criminal contempt proceedings against secretary of Iskcon,Bangalore and two advocates

BENGALURU: A division bench of the Karnataka high court has dropped criminal contempt of court proceedings initiated against Jai Chaitanya Dasa alias K Jayanarayana, Secretary, Iskcon,Bangalore and Ramesh Babu and S A Maruthi Prasad , the two advocates representing the organization.
The bench headed by Justice N Kumar has said that there is no merit in the complaint as in the entire episode, the court is not involved and no scandalous attack is made on the judges or judiciary in discharging their judicial function.
"The cause of action for the contempt proceedings is the utterances of the judge and the said two private communications, which are forbidden in law. It is purely a private matter between the learned judge who was devotee of a private temple, its factions and the advocates representing those factions. The contempt of courts act 1971 was not enacted by the parliament to deal with situations arising out of circumstances displayed before us "the bench has said.
The charge against Jaya Chiatanya Das was that he filed an affidavit seeking Justice K L Manjunath to recuse from the hearing a regular first appeal(RFA) filed by Iskon , Mumbai in 2009.
As regards to advocates, one of whom was a junior to Justice K L Manjunath , the charge was that they had approached two advocates who were senior and junior respectively of Justice Manjunath when he was practising to file vakalath on their behalf so as to make Justice Manjunath disabled from hearing the case.