Judges’ portraits irk Patil

Vijay Pandurang Patil, a former chief judicial magistrate and principal judge of the labor court has requested the chief justice of the Bombay High Court to remove portraits and statues of British and Indian judges who convicted Lokmanya Tilak and cancelled Mahatma Gandhi’s licence to practice as a barrister from the halls of the Court. To this end, he has written six letters to the chief justice, none of which has fetched him a response, reported The Economic Times (ET) on June 18, 2010. Patil now wants the chief justice to treat his letter as a public interest litigation.

"The place for these portraits and statues is not the Court halls but a museum,” Patil maintains. The portrait of Justice Dinshaw Davar in court room No 40 is anathema for him as the jurist had convicted Tilak for sedition. (In "Rights and reforms,” Events and Personalities, Parsiana, June 7, 2010, it was erroneously stated that Davar had passed an imprisonment order against Mahatma Gandhi. The error is regretted — editors). The bust of Chief Justice Sir Norman Macleod in the Central Hall is another of Patil’s targets. The judge, along with Justice Dinshaw F. Mulla whose statue graces the High Court’s garden, had removed Gandhi’s name from the roll of barristers on January 17, 1923 for his articles in Young India, notes ET.

In one of his epistles Patil contends that there is a government resolution for display of photographs of Mahatma Gandhi, Lokmanya Tilak, Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar, Lal Bahadur Shastri and others, but none for displaying photographs of British nationals. When lawyers appear before the court, they bow to the portraits of British judges, which Patil claims is not desirable and should be immediately remedied, ET concludes.