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Journalism of Courage
The keenly contested elections to the Calcutta Bar Association concluded on February 16 with the Trinamool Congress (TMC) ahead in 10 of the 15 posts, including the key ones of president and treasurer, while the BJP is ahead in the remaining five.
In a state which has often witnessed its fractious politics spilling into the courtroom, the Bar Association elections, openly fought on party lines, have set the stage for what is expected in the coming months leading up to the national elections.
The Bar election — held every two years to choose office bearers from among professional lawyers — itself is embroiled in a legal challenge with one of the candidates, Animesh Bhattacharya, seeking the intervention of the Calcutta High Court while alleging that the voting process was not entirely confidential since the serial number on the ballot paper could be traced to the voter.
Last month, as the Bar Association election took over the bustling corridors of the Calcutta High Court, the Old Post Office Road, the alley behind the imposing neo-Gothic court complex, was strewn with pamphlets and posters, some hanging from the decrepit walls of the Temple Chambers that housed the offices of lawyers.
As the votes were being counted, loud cheers followed every time the serial number of the contesting candidate and the name of a political party were read out on a loudspeaker.
In High Courts, the excitement over Bar elections — to choose office bearers from among professional lawyers registered with the court — is usually limited to those in the legal community. However, with the High Court taking cognisance of the allegations of sexual harassment made by women in Sandeshkhali against TMC strongmen, and weeks after a sitting judge, Abhijit Gangopadhyay, accused his senior colleague Justice Soumen Sen of working for “some political party”, the political stakes this around were unusually high.
Along with mugshots of candidates, the TMC hoardings prominently displayed images of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee (a lawyer by training), her nephew and party general secretary Abhishek Banerjee, and state Law Minister Moloy Ghatak. Another set of saffron coloured posters read “BJP Legal Department”.
This election, held from January 29 to February 2, around 6,800 of the Bar Association’s 10,000-odd members voters were eligible to vote for 51 candidates vying for 15 posts – president, vice-president, secretary, treasurer, two assistant secretaries and nine executive committee members. While in the last election held in 2021 former Congress MLA Arunava Ghosh, contesting as an Independent candidate, won the president’s post, the BJP won two seats in the executive committee. All other seats were won by the TMC.
This time, the BJP is claiming a bigger victory with its candidates ahead in the crucial posts of vice-president (Krishnendu Bhattacharya) and secretary (Shankar Prasad Dalapati). TMC candidates are ahead in the posts of president (Ashok Kumar Dhandania) and treasurer (Soumik Gangopadhyay). Of the two assistant secretary posts, the TMC (Dipanjan Datta) and BJP (Falguni Bandopadhyay) candidates have won one seat each. Of the nine posts in the Executive Committee, the TMC has won seven while BJP candidates have won two.
For an election and Bar that has been clearly framed in political terms, sources, however, insist that there is no bar on advocates taking briefs of the rival party.
Advocate Ashok Kumar Dhandhania, the TMC-backed candidate who is now leading in the election for the president’s post, while insisting that he would rise above politics in his new role, said, “Lawyers are also part of the society and all advocates have their own political beliefs. Despite that, if you see the voting pattern, I got votes from BJP, CPIM and Congress supporters. After getting elected, I can assure that I will be the president of the Bar Association irrespective of politics.”
Shankar Dalapati, the BJP-backed candidate for the post of secretary said, “The Bar Association is an apolitical organisation. But the way the TMC candidates campaigned this time, with photographs of Mamata Banerjee and Abhishek Banerjee, was unwarranted. They tarnished the image of the Bar Association.”
Old-timers insist this “political polarisation” of the Bar – and also the Bench – is at its highest now.
“The attitude always was that the Bar comes first and then the party affiliation. Over the last few years, it seems to be the other way round,” said senior advocate Jaideep Gupta, who began his career in the Calcutta High Court before moving to Delhi.
Established in 1862, the Bar Association is the most political of the court’s three Bars — the others being the more exclusive Calcutta Bar Library Club for barristers and the Incorporated Law Society for commercial lawyers. Over the last few years, members of the Bar have openly displayed their party affiliations and have been involved in several run-ins with judges.
Senior advocate Arunava Ghosh, the outgoing president of the Bar, was in August 2022 caught in a spat with Justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay. In a courtroom video that went viral on social media, the judge threatened to haul up Ghosh for contempt while calling him a “hooligan” when the latter questioned why journalists were frequenting the judge’s chambers. In response, Ghosh said that he “knows how to deal with a judge”.
Justice Gangopadhyay is learnt to have been affronted by a television interview in which Ghosh allegedly said that the judge did not know the law. It’s another matter that a year later, Justice Gangopadhyay himself gave an hour-long interview in which he spoke about ongoing cases against the state.
Ghosh had contested the last Bar election independently with support from Left groups. He had defeated both the TMC and BJP candidates while making a case that their influence in the Bar had led to religious polarisation.
In the 2019 election before that, the BJP had unexpectedly won eight of the 15 posts in the election. However, many argue that the TMC continued to wield power in the corridors and disrupt courtrooms. The Left, despite being on the backfoot in the state, continued to have a presence with the continued association of several senior members of Bar such as CPM MP Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharya. Bhattacharya appears before Justice Gangopadhyay in cases against Abhishek Banerjee.
In January 2023, lawyers allegedly affiliated to the TMC had protested outside Justice Rajasekhar Mantha’s Court Room No. 13, protesting against his orders that the state would not take any coercive action against BJP leader Suvendu Adhikari. The protest eventually turned into a scuffle with BJP-affiliated lawyers.
In 2019, state government lawyers had called for a boycott of Justice Samapti Chatterjee (now retired) after she quashed a no-confidence motion passed against the mayor of Bidhannagar, a BJP leader. Party MP Kalyan Banerjee, appearing for the state, had reportedly questioned the judge’s integrity when she walked out of the courtroom.
In 2021, during a hearing on post-poll violence in the state, the state government had sought the recusal of Justice Kaushik Chanda, a former Additional Solicitor General for the central government, on the grounds that he had ties with the BJP.
While it’s not uncommon for judges and lawyers to engage in heated exchanges across the Bench, the Calcutta High Court stands out for the frequency of these exchanges, the lack of comity and the blatant politics behind such ‘arguments’.
“Why blame the Bar alone? The judges are at war with each other. That sort of behaviour among the judges has also allowed the Bar to behave indifferently. After all, the Bar and the Bench mirror each other and are cut from the same cloth,” said a senior advocate and a member of the Bar Library.
Meanwhile, another election — to the Lok Sabha — is round the corner. Whoever wins, the camaraderie in the courtroom is likely to be fraught.
