19, Feb 2016

Krishnadas Rajagopal
NEW DELHI, February 19, 2016
“We could have been beaten black and blue. We barely escaped with our lives,” senior advocate Rajeev Dhawan told the Supreme Court on Thursday. He was recounting the “atmosphere of terror” at the Patiala House court complex on Wednesday as a mob dressed in lawyer’s black robes unleashed violence despite the Supreme Court’s restraining order.
Mr. Dhawan was part of the six-member team of senior lawyers handpicked by a Supreme Court Bench of Justices J. Chelameswar and A.M. Sapre to visit the court complex where the hearing of a sedition case against JNUSU president Kanhaiya Kumar was scheduled to be heard by the metropolitan magistrate on Wednesday afternoon. The team’s report was submitted to the Supreme Court Bench in sealed covers on Thursday.
Six lawyers appearing in the sedition case, journalists and Mr. Kumar’s university friends were trapped inside the courtroom, along with the Magistrate hearing the case, after violence broke out on the premises. Around this time, the team of senior advocates Kapil Sibal, Harin Rawal, Mr. Dhawan, Dushyant Dave, along with the Delhi High Court’s counsel A.D.N. Rao and the police counsel Ajit Sinha, arrived at the court complex as directed by the Supreme Court. “As we went in there, we saw a crowd of such proportion we have never seen before. It was unprecedented. They were in robes… even our police cordon was broken with people pushing at us,” Mr. Dhawan orally told the court after the team returned a few hours later.