“We, therefore, sentence the contemnor with a fine or (SIC) Re. 1/- (Rupee one) to be deposited with the Registry of this court by 15.09.2020, failing which he shall undergo a simple imprisonment for a period of three months and further be debarred from practicing in this Court for a period of three years,” (#93) said a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court of India while pronouncing quantum of punishment on Prashant Bhushan in a contempt of court case against him. It was part of an 82-page decree pronounced on 31 August. Bhushan had writtten a one-sentence tweet opining about the Supreme Court’s role in eroding freedoms in the world’s largest democracy. He said, “When historians in the future look back at the last six years to see how democracy has been destroyed in India even without a formal Emergency, they will particularly mark the role of the SC in this destruction, and more particularly the role of the last four CJIs.” Two days later (29 June), his second tweet said, “The CJI rides a Rs 50-lakh motorcycle belonging to a BJP leader at Raj Bhavan, Nagpur, without wearing a mask or helmet, at a time when he keeps the SC on lockdown mode denying citizens their fundamental right to access justice!” This tweet had a photo of CJI Bobde astride a Harley-Davidson.
The Supreme court Suo Moto issued a notice to the Attorney General for India and to Prashant Bhushan, who is also an advocate attached to the same court. Bhushan was asked to apologise, which he refused saying, “I do not appeal to magnanimity. I am here, therefore, to cheerfully submit to any penalty that can lawfully be inflicted upon me for what the Court has determined to be an offence, and what appears to me to be the highest duty of a citizen.”
Here is a clear case where the convicted person is made a prisoner of his conscience. But the court showed mercy by punishing him with a fine of just a rupee, but this clemency would not have come for any one in India who was of lesser status than Adv. Prashant Bhushan. For all the rest it would have been “simple imprisonment for a period of three months and further be debarred from practicing in this Court for a period of three years.” Were his allegations proved wrong or his criticism unfounded?
It was a one-rupee medication for a headache prescribed by the Judges who were criticised. In Mikhail Bulgakov’s ‘The Master and Margarita’ Pilate asks Jesus, “What is truth?” and Jesus replies, “It is your headache which will become your death ache.” You have a medication here in the sense of Plato’s pharmakon, which can be seen at once as medicine and poison given to the citizens of India. Socrates was similarly contemned to death for becoming a headache to the court. “I would rather die having spoken after my manner than speak in your manner and live,” said Socrates. He was called by Hegel “the inventor of morality” and he was looked upon as a model in the European civilisation. Antigone, who became a tragic hero for burying her brother’s body against the interdict of the king, proclaimed:“So for me to meet this doom is trifling grief; but if I had suffered my mother’s son to lie in death an unburied corpse, that would have grieved me; for this, I am not grieved. And if my present deeds are foolish in thy sight, it may be that a foolish judge arraigns my folly.” She would not deny the voice within of the mysterious force, the deinon. Aristotle obeyed the ‘inner voice’ and met with his death. What future does our democracy, where the conscience is put in prison, have? Antigone told her king: “Indeed, if I mock, ‘tis with pain that I mock thee.” George Orwell rang the warning bell in 1984: ‘“Does Big Brother exist?” “Of course he exists.” “Does he exist like you or me?” “You do not exist.”’