A heated exchange took place inside the courtroom of the Gujarat High Court between Justice Biren Vaishnav and his junior colleague Justice Mauna Bhatt recently over a disagreement during an ongoing tax matter. The entire incident was recorded in the camera installed in the courtroom and the video clip of the spat was widely shared on social media, but later pulled down from YouTube channel after the Court’s instructions. The High Court live-streams hearings of all its benches on the channel.
In the video, Justice Vaishnav was seen passing an order, to which Justice Bhatt disagreed.
When the Court reopened later, Justice Vaishnav apologised for his outburst against his female colleague on the bench, just before the day’s hearings began. He said: “What happened on Monday, shouldn’t have happened. I was wrong. I am sorry for that. We begin a new session. It shouldn’t have happened. It’s just that, I don’t know…I was wrong.”
Justice Vaishnav had openly expressed annoyance after Justice Bhatt reportedly murmured some disagreement to him about the judgment in the case. Justice Vaishnav could be heard saying: “Then you differ, yaar. Then you differ… You have differed in one, differ in the other”. Justice Bhatt then said, “It is not a question of separation”. “Then don’t murmur. Then you pass a separate order, We are not taking any more cases,” Justice Vaishnav replied. He then got up and walked out of the courtroom saying that the bench was not hearing further matters.
In November 2022, Justice D Bharatha Chakravarthy of the Madras High Court had apologised to four women litigants for the “insensitive” and “humiliating” questions of a cross-examining lawyer in a property dispute case. “The purpose of cross examination was not to create indelible scars in the minds of the litigants or to humiliate them. It is time that we are a little more empathetic to the litigants who approach us. When hapless women approach the court for their legitimate right, they could not be subjected to character assassination,” the judge said.
In this case, a dispute arose over the partitioning of a private property, where four women—wife and three daughters—challenged a man’s decision to bestow all his property to a son he had begotten with another woman. According to the Court order, during cross-examination, the defence lawyer “very high-handedly” put across questions to portray the husband’s first wife as a loose woman and questioned the paternity of her daughters. “This kind of insensitivity and mistakes which assassinate the character are generally masked for public consumption in the judgment. But I am constrained to extract the same, because such insensitive cross-examination, especially in the absence of any valid material regarding the same, should not be resorted to. A learned brother member of the Bar had done so, which also happened under the supervision of the Court. Therefore, on this score also, the Court conveys its apologies,” Justice Chakravarthy said.
“On behalf of the society at large, the Court conveys the due apologies to the plaintiffs, the daughters and that they can be rest assured that they are as good as sons for all purposes and that is the purport of the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005,” the Justice further observed.
—By Adarsh Kumar and India Legal Bureau