Supreme Court tells the Allahabad chief justice to act on the Lakhimpur Kheri trial judge

The Supreme Court on Monday told the chief justice of the Allahabad High Court to act on allegations against the judge trying the 2021 Lakhimpur Kheri violence case. The allegation, put by advocate Prashant Bhushan for the victims, is that the presiding officer transferred several criminal cases to his own court and acquitted the accused. The same bench told the Uttar Pradesh government to appoint a new public prosecutor for the trial at the earliest.

Chief Justice Surya Kant sat with Justices Joymalya Bagchi and V. Mohana. The hearing was a sequel to an order of 22 September, when the court had asked the high court chief justice to look into the conduct, take remedial action, and send a report in a sealed cover. On Monday, senior advocate Rakesh Dwivedi, for the high court registry, told the bench that an administrative committee would have to be set up before the allegations could be examined. The Supreme Court was not persuaded to wait on that sequence. It said the chief justice should take appropriate action under paragraph three of the 22 September order.

What paragraph three already required

The 22 September order had a specific instruction. The Registrar (Vigilance) of the high court was to forward a report to the Supreme Court in a sealed cover, indicating the action the chief justice might take. Monday's hearing found that report still unfinished, and the registry's answer was a committee. The bench's reply was to send the chief justice back to the paragraph he had already been given. Expeditious, in this order, means the administrative step does not become the delay.

Bhushan's submission on 22 September was broader than a single acquittal. He said the judge had transferred several matters to himself and had either granted bail or acquitted the accused. The court has not, in the orders reported on Monday, named the officer or found the transfers unlawful. It has treated the allegation as serious enough to take out of the ordinary vigilance queue and put under the chief justice, with a sealed report back to Delhi.

The trial the order sits on

The case is the violence of 3 October 2021 at Tikonia in Lakhimpur Kheri, in which eight people were killed: four farmers and a journalist in one incident, and three men linked to the convoy in the violence that followed. Ashish Mishra, son of former Union minister Ajay Mishra Teni, is the prime accused in the main case of running a convoy into the farmers. The Supreme Court has supervised bail and trial arrangements in that prosecution for years. Monday's plea was connected to Mishra's case, Law Trend reported.

A public prosecutor is the state's voice in that courtroom. The bench's second direction, that Uttar Pradesh name a new one at the earliest, implies the present arrangement is not acceptable to the victims' side or to the court. The order as reported does not say the outgoing prosecutor was removed for misconduct. It says a new one should be appointed, and soon. In a case this closely watched, a change of prosecutor is a change in who decides which witness is called and which contradiction is left on the page.

What the sealed cover will have to answer

The chief justice's report has to deal with a narrow set of facts. Did this officer transfer cases to himself? If he did, under which administrative order? Did those transfers produce acquittals or bail that another court might not have granted? An administrative committee can collect the file. The Supreme Court has said the chief justice, not the committee, owns the action. Paragraph three of the September order is the measure. Until the sealed cover arrives, the presiding officer remains the judge on the record, and the victims' lawyers remain in a court whose transfers they have asked Delhi to examine.

The practical pressure is on two offices at once. The high court registry has been told that a committee is not a substitute for the chief justice's action. The state government has been told that the trial should not wait on an unnamed prosecutor. Lakhimpur Kheri has already spent five years between a convoy, a set of deaths, and a courtroom whose presiding officer is now the subject of a vigilance report the Supreme Court expects to read.