NEW DELHI: Barely a fortnight after his party lost the Bihar polls, RJD supremo and Railway Minister Lalu Prasad on Tuesday forcefully pointed out a flaw in the SC order relating to the judge trying the fodder scam cases against him besides giving an indication of his feeling the heat under the Nitish Kumar regime.
Prasad through counsel Ram Jethmalani made no bones of his grievance and told the bench that he was short-changed by the unwarranted insertion of a paragraph by the court in its Oct 26 order giving liberty to the Patna HC chief justice to change the trial judge if he so desired.
“Why did the apex court activate the mind of the chief justice of the HC?” Jethmalani asked. He said this paragraph, which was not dictated in the open court, had caused “immense damage to the railway minister at a time when he was being accused of influencing the trial”.
The bench, while maintaining that such an order could be passed in the administrative side, clarified that that the paragraph in question was not a direction to the Patna HC CJ to change the trial judge, Munni Lal Paswan. —Dawn/The Times of India News Service
