“Justice Prasad is not a fit person to be appointed as the Chairman of PCI”, Prashant Bhushan writes to Narendra Modi

While Justice CK Prasad took charge as the new Chairman of the Press Council of India (PCI) today, Advocate Prashant Bhushan has written a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi to cancel Justice Prasad’s appointment. In the letter, written in his capacity as the Convenor of the Campaign for Judicial Accountability and Reforms, Bhushan has also prayed for setting up an independent body to exclusively deal with the appointments of retired judges to important offices. .The letter makes scathing allegations against Justice Prasad in the light of the revelations by Senior Advocate Dushyant Dave earlier this year. As per the letter, Justice Prasad,.“…is not a fit person to be appointed as the chairman of PCI since he has misused his position as a Judge of Supreme Court.”.The letter then sets out in detail about how Justice Prasad had suo moto tagged an unrelated matter to a case he was hearing and had given an order in favour of Mistry Construction..“Both of the matters when came up for hearing on 25th February 2014, at the outset itself, Justice C K Prasad accepted the submission of Mr. C.U Singh, Senior Advocate that both the matter are not connected to each other. Despite, there being no connection, civil appeal no 9454-9455/2010 was taken up and in the absence of any effective representation from City and Industrial Development Corporation of Maharashtra (herein after referred as CIDCO) a statutory body, the civil appeal was allowed without any debate. This was despite the fact that settlement was rejected earlier by a different bench of the Supreme Court earlier vide order dated 25.04.2013. This has led to Mistry Construction to get the respective tender and 35 hectares of prime land in Pune worth hundreds of crores which was rejected by the Hon’ble Bombay High Court.”.The letter alleges that,.“It has also been reliably learnt that Mistry Construction is owned by Justice Prasad’s ex-junior’s in laws.”.Stating that Justice Prasad “ought to be prosecuted for his act of criminal misconduct and corruption, rather than being rewarded by being given an important position”, Bhushan has requested Modi to cancel the appointment of Justice Prasad as the Chairman of PCI..The letter ends with a request to set up an independent body to exclusively deal with appointments of retired judges to important offices so as to help restore the trust of people in the credibility of various offices and the judiciary..Image of Justice CK Prasad taken from here.