“No lawyer, no apology, no fine…”: Kunal Kamra’s open letter to the Supreme Court takes Twitter by storm

An open letter addressed to the Supreme Court judges and the Attorney General of India by stand-up comedian Kunal Kamra took Twitter by storm on Friday.

Attorney General KK Venugopal on Thursday had given his consent to petitions initiating contempt of court proceedings against Kamra for his disparaging tweets directed at the Supreme Court for its out-of-turn hearing of a bail plea by Republic TV owner/Editor Arnab Goswami and the court granting bail to him.

Kamra had earlier been ‘ banned’ from flying by several airlines after the Civil Aviation Minister Hardeep Puri declared that Kamra’s heckling of Goswami on a flight to Lucknow amounted to breach of security.

The Supreme Court of India, which took out-of-turn hearing of Goswami’s bail plea, has not had the time to hear many other bail pleas by individuals and has rejected several, sending many of the petitions back to the High Court. But in Goswami’s case, while the Bombay High Court refused to grant him bail, the Supreme Court stepped in to grant him ‘interim bail’.

The open letter was tweeted by Kamra at 12.37 pm on Friday. In just about an hour it had been liked over 20 thousand times and had been retweeted four thousand times. By 2 pm the likes were over 25 thousand and the letter had been retweeted five and a half thousand times.

Here is the full text of his open letter:

Dear Supreme Court Judges, Mr K K Venugopal,

The tweets I recently put out have been found in contempt of court. All that I tweeted was from my view of the Supreme Court of India giving a partial decision in favour of a Prime Time Loudspeaker.

I believe I must confess I very much love holding court and enjoying a platform with a captive audience. An audience of Supreme Court judges and the nation’s topmost law offier is perhaps as VIP an audience as it gets. But I realise that more than any entertainment venue I would perform in, a time slot before the Supreme Court is a scarce commodity.

My view hasn’t changed because the silence of the Supreme Court of India on matters of others’ personal liberty cannot go uncriticized. I don’t tend to retract my tweets or apologise for them. I believe they speak for themselves. I wish to volunteer having the time that would be allotted to the hearing of my contempt petition ( 20 hours at the very least if Prashant Bhushan hearing is anything to go by) to other matters and parties who have not been as lucky and privileged as I am to jump the queue.

May I suggest the Demonetisation petition, the petition challenging the revocation of the special status of J & K, the matter of the legality of electoral bonds or countless other matters that are more deserving of time and attention. To slightly misquote Senior Advocate Harish Salve, “ Will the heavens fall if more salient mattes are allotted my time ?”

The Supreme Court of India hasn’t yet declared my tweets anything as of now. But if and when they do, I hope they can have a small laugh before declaring them contempt of court. Also, in one of my tweets, I had asked for the replacement of the photo of Mahatma Gandhi at the Supreme Court of India with that of Harish Salve. I would like to add that Pandit Nehru’s photo should also be replaced with that of Mahesh Jethmalani.”