High Court judge gave 2 orders going against Mamata govt

On Monday, when Justice Mantha was to hear several cases, a section of the lawyers staged a protest outside his courtroom, disrupting the proceedings, and resolved not to take part in his court.

Justice Mantha’s petition against the lawyers saying they had obstructed their colleagues too from appearing in his court is listed before a Division Bench of Chief Justice Prakash Shrivastava and Justice Rajarshi Bharadwaj.

In December last year, Justice Mantha had given protection to Adhikari, the Leader of Opposition, directing the state police not to register any more FIRs against him without the High Court’s permission. Adhikari had petitioned that 26 FIRs had been registered against him in different police stations to prevent him from performing his duties as MLA.

Before that, Justice Mantha had removed the protection granted to Maneka Gambhir, the sister-in-law of Abhishek Banerjee, in a money laundering case.

Justice Mantha, 56, did his schooling from Kolkata, before pursuing law at University College of Law, Nagpur University, followed by an LL.M. in Commercial Corporate Law at King’s College, London.

He was enrolled as an Advocate with the Bar Council of West Bengal in December 1991 and as a Senior Advocate in July 2015, before being elevated as Additional Judge of the Calcutta High Court in 2017. Two years later, he became a Permanent Judge.

Among those who criticised the lawyers’ action was Justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay, who had to face similar protests last April after he ordered a CBI probe into the teachers’ recruitment scam in government schools in the state.