The Court laid down guidelines for the High Court Legal Aid Centre, Madras and the Registry of the Court regarding the registration of telegrams as H.C.Ps.

This petition is registered on a telegram received by the Chief Justice issued by M. G. Shivaraj, Advocate. It is issued on 11-10-1993 at 18-29 hrs. The contains of the telegram are that Vaiyapuri, son of Govindaswamy, aged 18 years of Canalpuram Palavakkam, Madras was forcibly taken by the Inspector of Police. Thuraipakkam and his men on 7-10-1993 and was illegally detained for the past five days. It is stated that the life of the petitioner is in stake and relatives are not allowed to feed him. The Chief Justice is requested to kindly intervene and save this life of the petitioner. When this H.C.P. was posted before on 13-10-1993, nobody was present on behalf of the petitioner. The name of the counsel Mr. Shivaraj appeared in the cause list. But, he remained absent. We were informed by the Public Prosecutor that a regular writ petition has been filed and it is numbered as H.C.P. No. 1900/93 with respect to the very same matter and it comes up before the other Bench consisting of Arunachalam, J. and Swamidurai, J. we direct the matter to be posted the next day i.e., yesterday. Yesterday also nobody represented the petitioner and counsel remained absent. We directed the matter to be posted today.

2. Today, Dr. G. Krishnamoorthy appears in Court and represents that Mr. Shivaraj is his junior and as H.C.P. No. 1900/93 has been entertained, there is no necessity for this petition and this can be dismissed as such. The Public Prosecutor represents that nowadays it has become a fashion to send telegram of this kind and then file writ petitions making allegations that no action has been taken. It is submitted by him that advocates should not be permitted to send telegrams like this. It is also brought to our notice that most of the telegrams do not contain the address or other particulars of the sender and on enquiry the contents are found to be false.

3. We find that the complaint of the Public Prosecutor is well laid. We have already noted that the telegram was issued at 18.29 hrs. on 11-10-1993. It has been issued by an advocate. It reached the Chief Justice on the 12th morning and immediately ordered to be registered as H.C.P. Nobody could have expected any action earlier than that. Yet, in H.C.P. No. 1990/93, the petitioner viz., Mrs. Dhanam, w/o Govindaswamy being the mother of the person who is said to have been in custody has filed an affidavit alleging in paragraph 7 that she sent telegrams through her counsel on 11-10-1993 to His Excellency the Governor of Tamil Nadu, the Chief Justice of Tamil Nadu, the Home Secretary, the the Director General of Police and the Superintendent of Police, Chengai M.G.R. East District and that "there is no effect to the same". It is said, "I have no other alternative remedy than to invoke the Special Original Jurisdiction of this Court under Art. 226 of the Constitution of India". The affidavit has been sworn to on the 12th day of October, 1993. It has been taken on file on that day itself and registered as H.C.P. No. 1990 of 1993. The very allegation shows that the telegram has not been sent with bona fide intention. The telegram is sent by one advocate late in the evening and the next morning another advocate files a regular writ petition alleging that no action has been taken on the telegram. Both advocates belong to the same office, being the juniors of Dr. Krishnamurthy. The advocate who sent the telegram does not choose to appear before Court even though the matter is shown in the cause list for three days consecutively.

4. It is submitted by the Public Prosecutor that the Registry should not register every telegram as a H.C.P. In our view, he is right. We have now come across a number of cases in which this practice of registering telegrams as writ petitions under Art. 226 of the Constitution of India is being not only misused but also grossly abused. In one case, a petition under Art. 226 of the Constitution was pending as H.C.P. No. 1239 of 1993 from 2-8-1993. In that ca