NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Tuesday initiated suo motu contempt proceedings against senior activist-lawyer Prashant Bhushan and Twitter India for his alleged derogatory tweets against the judiciary. The matter is scheduled to be heard on Wednesday by a bench headed by Justice Arun Mishra.
It is, however, not clear as to which tweets of Bhushan are treated as contempt by the top court.
On June 27, he had tweeted: “When historians in future look back at the last 6 years to see how democracy has been destroyed in India even without a formal Emergency, they will particularly mark the role of the Supreme Court in this destruction, & more particularly the role of the last 4 CJIs.”
This is not the first contempt proceeding initiated against Bhushan.
In March 2019, he had admitted in the Supreme Court to a genuine mistake in tweeting that the government appeared to have misled the top court and had perhaps submitted fabricated minutes of the high-powered selection panel meeting for the appointment of M Nageswara Rao as the interim CBI chief.
Bhushan has been raising issues about the judiciary and recently, he was very critical and vocal of how the Supreme Court handled the matters related to migrant workers amid the Covid-19 pandemic.
He also made statements relating to the treatment meted out to jailed activists like Varavara Rao and Sudha Bharadwaj who are accused in the Bhima-Koregaon case.