The four cousins were nick-named Periya Meena (Big), Chinna Meena (Small), Kutti Meena (Little) and Kunju Meena (Tiny). On a recent trip my aunt, who was just a week elder to my mother, was reminiscing how they had fun going to the same class in high school.
Say there were forty students in class, two of them were Meenakshi. Being in Madurai, I am sure the class had another two Meenakshis, who were often differentiated in the class by their initials. If so, 10 per cent of the people in the class had the same name. Similar common names are found in every part of the country. When I was in Karnataka, I used to have difficulty keeping count of Manjunaths I know or for that matter Basavas. If one counts the number of Manjunaths and Basavas in Karnataka, they would easily outnumber the entire Parsi population in the country. Which is why it was no great surprise that in a list of three crore investors submitted by the Sahara group, there were some six thousand Kalawatis. (A newspaper had run a front page story on this “unusual” recurrence of Kalawatis in the Sahara list.)
This is what Sahara lawyers had come prepared to prove in the Court last week. They had even brought the voters’ list wherein they could find over 500 Kalawatis in a single locality.
They argued that Sebi was trying to prejudice the court and public opinion by leaking the contents of a list which they had shared exclusively with Sebi. But why would Sebi leak such harmless information if at all they wanted to prejudice? Because six thousand Kalawatis in a list of three crore investors amounts to less than one-fiftieth of a percentage. Like Sahara contends only Sebi and Sahara knew the contents of the compact disc containing the names of the investors. Sebi denies leaking any CD to media, worse they say they have not counted Kalawatis. Who else could have leaked? Who is trying to benefit from the leak?
In an earlier instance also, Sahara accused Sebi of leaking details of the case to media. In that instance, judges took cognizance of media interference. A constitution bench headed by the chief justice was formed to go into the matter thoroughly.
The bench, headed by Chief Justice SH Kapadia, said that if publishing news related to a trial would “create a real and substantial risk of prejudice to the proper administration of justice or to the fairness of trial”, the court could grant a postponement order, temporarily gagging the media from reporting on it. “The court could grant such preventive relief after balancing the constitutional rights to a fair trial against freedom of speech, said the bench, keeping in mind that “such orders of postponement should be for short duration,” the judgment said.
However, in the matter of Kalawati, courts probably thought “What is in a name?”
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