Still no Western UP court bench, lawyers blame PM

Lawyers in Western Uttar Pradesh have a grudge against Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee. In fact, they have been upset with him ever since he be...

Lawyers in Western Uttar Pradesh have a grudge against Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee. In fact, they have been upset with him ever since he became PM.

It was in 1986 that Vajpayee, then Leader of the Opposition, spoke in support of the demand of lawyers for a separate HC bench for Western UP. But once he became PM, lawyers allege, he turned his back on the issue.

That year (1986), Vajpayee endeared himself to lawyers in Western UP with his oratory. He had even pulled up the then Law minister Hans Raj Bharadwaj on the delay in deciding to set up the bench. “Yeh mantri ji ke liye mamooli baat hai,’’ Vajpayee had then said.

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‘‘Seventeen years have passed since that day but the bench is nowhere in sight,’’ says Meerut Bar Council president Anil Bakshi. With no bench in Western UP, litigants from the area find pursuing their cases a costly affair. And Allahabad is a good 600 km. This makes litigation expensive, time-consuming and also tiring.

Meanwhile, lawyers in Allahabad are against the setting up of a bench because they currently earn more than Rs 100 crore from the litigants from Western UP, lawyers here say. They also allege that the Eastern UP lawyers are being backed by powerful leaders like Union Minister Murli Manohar Joshi and Kesri Nath Tripathi.

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