JOIN USA letter which Justice Raghupathy of the Madras High Court wrote to the then Chief Justice of India K G Balakrishnan, refers to the Union Minister involved in this shocking misdemeanor as Raja. The former minister allegedly tried to influence the judge by phone through the minister’s lawyer-friend R K Chandramohan, who is also the Chairman of the Tamil Nadu Bar Council.
The letter forms part of the documents in a PIL filed by a Chennai lawyer, who sought a direction to remove Chandramohan as he tried influencing Justice Raghupathy on the pretext that the accused were “friends of Union Minister Raja”.
Raghupathy was then hearing an anticipatory bail application by one S Kiruba Sridhar, a third year medical student in Puducherry and his doctor-father Krishnamoorthy who allegedly tried to tamper with Sridhar’s marks to get him a seat. They were wanted by the CBI for using the services of a Pondicherry University official and a middleman for this purpose.
The issue caused a huge furore when Raghupathy in the open Court last year first aired his anguish about the counsel’s behaviour and a Union Minister trying to reach him through the lawyer, who pleaded anticipatory bail to the clients stated to be “family friends of Raja”.
At that time it was not clear whether the minister involved was Raja. But subsequently the single judge wrote to the Chief Justice of India about the sequence of events that day, in which Raja’s name was “dropped” by the counsel for the accused in the marksheet case.
The letter refers to Chandramohan meeting the judge in his chamber, “dropping” Raja’s name while broaching the anticipatory bail plea by the two accused and urging that it be “favourably considered”.
Justice Raghupathy had also reportedly mentioned in his letter that the counsel then handed over a mobile phone by claiming that the Union Minister was on the line.