Mamata removes her Public Prosecutor in High Court: Will this be the last of rejigs in state’s high judiciary for now?

 The order to replace Saswata Gopal Mukherji with Debashish Roy, it was learned, was taken at a confidential meeting at Nabanna on Monday

Sougata Mukhopadhyay, TT, Calcutta, 07.11.23 : The Trinamul Congress administration in Bengal removed its longest-serving Public Prosecutor in Calcutta High Court, Saswata Gopal Mukherji, on Tuesday and chose to bring back Debashish Roy, another senior advocate of the court who served as the first PP of the Mamata Banerjee government when it ascended to power in 2011, in Mukherji’s place.

Mukherjee served as the PP in High Court since 2017, for a good six years and 11 months and defended the government in criminal cases against leaders like Mukul Roy, Suvendu Adhikari, Arjun Singh and high-profile cases like the Bogtui carnage, was removed by the government rather unceremoniously, sources told The Telegraph Online.

In one of the recent appearances for the police in the keenly watched Enforcement Directorate cases against Leaps and Bounds, a company dragged into the school recruitment scam case and whose CEO is TMC national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee, Mukherji’s effective argument in the case in the court of Justice Amrita Sinha was believed to have stopped the court from passing an adverse order against the men in uniform.

The Public Prosecutor, by virtue of his chair, is in charge of the supervision of all the criminal suits involving the state government at the High Court.

The order to replace Mukherji with Roy, it was learned, was taken at a confidential meeting at the state secretariat, Nabanna, on Monday. The meeting was chaired by chief minister Mamata Banerjee. State law minister Malay Ghatak, chief secretary H.K. Dwivedi and R. Rajasekaran, the Additional DG of the state Criminal Investigation Department (CID) were among those present at the meeting. Sources confirmed that the government’s back-to-back embarrassments with regard to multiple corruption cases at the state’s highest judicial corridors may have prompted Banerjee to make the move and that more such rejigs are in the pipeline sooner rather than later.

Although both the government notification for replacing Mukherji with Roy and the former’s resignation letter came on the following day, sources also confirmed that the state’s notice actually preceded the former PP’s resignation. “It has been a wonderful experience to serve the state. However, now I intend to engage myself in other professional pursuits,” Mukherji’s letter read. Son of eminent jurist Mukul Gopal Mukherji, the former chief justice of Rajasthan High Court and the former chairperson of the Bengal human rights commission, Saswata Gopal confessed he wasn’t anticipating anything like this.

“I was receiving cryptic messages from friends in the fraternity since last evening and I realized that the government may have taken a call with regard to my continuation in the post. I sent my resignation as soon I was sure,” he said, while asserting he was not in favour of any debates on this issue.

“I am not aggrieved. The government was my client. And it’s the client who chooses its lawyer and not the other way round. If the client decides to change its lawyer, there’s not much the lawyer can do about it,” Mukherji stated.