Judgment

KIRISHNA IYER, J. :- Mrs. Maneka Gandhi figures as an accused in a prosecution launched against her and other by Miss. Rani Jethmalani for an offence of defamation in the Court of the Metropolitan Magistrate, Bombay. The former is the editor of a monthly called "Surya" and is the wife of Shri Sanjay Gandhi and daughter-in-law of Smt. Indira Gandhi, former Prime Minister. The latter is a young advocate and is the daughter of a leading advocate and currently an important Member of Parliament. The present petition has been made for a transfer of the criminal case from Bombay to Delhi, and a string of grounds has been set out to validate the prayer. We decline the transfer and proceed to give our reasons without making the least reflection on the merits of the case.

2. Assurance of a fair trial is the first imperative of the dispensation of justice and the central criterion for the court to consider when a motion for transfer is made is not the hypersensitivity or relative convenience of a party or easy availability of legal services or like mini-grievances. Something more substantial, more compelling, more imperilling, from the point of view of public justice and its attendant environment, is necessitous if the Court is to exercise its power of transfer. This is the cardinal principle although the circumstances may be myriad and vary from case to case. We have to test the petitioners grounds on this touch-stone bearing in mind the rule that normally the complainant has the right to choose any court having jurisdiction and the accused cannot dictate where the case against him should be tried. Even so, the process of justice should not harass the parties and from that angle the court may weight the circumstances.

3. One of the common circumstances alleged in applications for transfer is the avoidance of substantial prejudice to a party or witnesses on account of logistics or like factors especially when an alternative venue will not seriously handicap the complainant and will mitigate the serious difficulties of the accused. In the present case the petitioner claims that both the parties reside in Delhi and some formal witnesses belong to Delhi; but the meat of the matter, in a case of defamation, is some thing different. The main witnesses are those who speak to having read the offending matter and other relevant circumstances flowing therefrom. They belong to Bombay in this case and the suggestion of the petitioners counsel that Delhi readers may be substitute witnesses and the complainant may content herself with examining such persons is too presumptuous for serious consideration.

4. Now to the next ground. The sophisticated processes of a criminal trial certainly require competent legal service to present a partys case. If an accused person, for any particular reason, is virtually deprived of this facility, an essential aid to fair trial fails. If in a certain court the whole Bar, for reasons of hostility or otherwise, refuses to defend an accused person - an extraordinary situation difficult to imagine, having regard to the ethics of the profession - it may well be put forward as a ground which merits this Courts attention. Popular frenzy or official wrath shall not deter a member of the Bar from offering his services to those who wear unpopular names or unpalatable causes and the Indian advocate may not fail this standard. Counsel has narrated some equivocal episodes which seem to suggest that the services of an efficient advocate may not be easy to procure to defend Mrs. Maneka Gandhi. Such glib allegations which involve a reflection on the members of the Bar in Bombay may not be easily accepted without incontestible testimony in that behalf, apart from the ipse dixit of the party. That is absent here. It is difficult to believe that a person of the position of the petitioner who is the daughter-in-law of the former Prime Minister, wife of a consequential person and, in her own right, an editor of a popular magazine, i