HC rejects Paloli’s apology

The High Court Bench—comprising acting Chief Justice K S Radhakrishnan and Justice M N Krishnan—reiterated on Friday that Paloli was no layman but a minister with constitutional rights and responsibilities. Therefore, what he said would have a far-reaching impact. It has posted the case for May 30.

Responding to the development, Paloli said on Friday he would not change his stance. “If I am sent to jail, I will go happily. After all, it wouldn’t be for corruption or some sex scam,” he said.

CPI(M) State Secretary Pinarayi Vijayan said the party would fight the battle legally. Dismissing demands for Paloli’s resignation, he said even EMS Namboodiripad had been hauled up for contempt and he did not resign. Earlier precedents, involving Congress ministers quitting after adverse court remarks, had all been related to corruption charges, Pinarayi pointed out.

CPI(M) sources said that Paloli could have spared the party the embarrassment of his first making an unqualified apology only to have the court reject it, leaving him to reiterate his stance on the controversial speech. “He was obviously given wrong legal advice, we will look into that,” said party sources.

Paloli, member of the CPI(M) Central Committee, had said in a public speech last month that “courts are changing to a shameful state where verdicts are being handed on the basis of the weight of currency note bundles”. He had referred to the High Court striking down the Kerala Left’s showpiece Bill to bring private self-financing colleges under close government control.

Paloli filed his apology soon after the High Court took up the issue. However, the court had declined to take it as a sincere regret and termed his outburst “scurrilous abuse” lowering the dignity and respectability of the judicial system before the common people, amounting to “inflicting a deep wound on the country’s judiciary”.

The court suggested that the damage could perhaps be lessened if Paloli made a public apology. But the CPI(M) state secretariat put its foot down against this. Paloli went on record saying that he stood by what he had said about courts, and the only mistake he had made was that he generalised the judiciary. “There’s no way I am going to apologise to the people for this,” he had asserted.

In 1970, E M S Namboodiripad, the then Chief Minister, was held guilty of contempt and sentenced for saying that the judiciary was class biased. He had proclaimed that “Marx and Engels considered the judiciary an instrument of oppression and even today…it continues to be so”. He had said, “Judges are guided and dominated by class hatred, class interests and class prejudices. And where the evidence is balanced between a well-dressed, pot-bellied rich man and a poor, ill-dressed and illiterate person, the judge instinctively favours the former.”

The Kerala High Court had held him guilty of criminal contempt and he was fined a token Re 1. The Supreme Court upheld the Kerala High Court judgment, caustically observing that he had failed to read Marx and Engels properly.

Meanwhile, CPI(M) sources said the party was holding discussions with legal experts for filing an appeal in the Supreme Court. “We now see a provision for moving an appeal. Consultations are on for the same”, politburo member S Ramachandran Pillai told The Indian Express.