Today marked the first Justice Verma Memorial Lecture telecasted live on NewsX. The ceremony was conducted at Manas Bhawan in Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh.
A joint effort by the Bar Council of India, the State Bar Council of Madhya Pradesh, and the Bar Association of Jabalpur led to the organisation of the event by the Justice Verma Memorial Committee, whose head is Rajya MP and Senior Advocate Vivek Tankha.
The chief guest at this occasion was Vice President of India H.E. Jagdeep Dhankar joined by chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan and Governor Mangubhai Patel of Madhya Pradesh. Meanwhile, Justice JK Maheshwari and Justice SK Kaul, a judge on the Supreme Court, Justice Ravi Malimath, and the Chief Justice of Madhya Pradesh also attended the event.
While speaking at the JV Memorial lection, Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan discussed the importance of the use of mother tongue language in Courts.
According to MP Chief Minister, “Citizens are unable to understand the judgments passed by the courts as 92% of the citizens in Madhya Pradesh do not know English.”
In order to comfort the common man, he said, “I ask for our mother tongue to be introduced into the courts, Kannad in Karnataka, Tamil in Tamil Nadu, and Hindi, which is our mother language in Madhya Pradesh.”
In addition, Shivraj said, “I would like to congratulate Prime Minister Narendra Modi who is extremely proud of his language and speak it throughout the globe and Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee who was the first politician to deliver a speech in Hindi.”
The chief minister of Madhya Pradesh has called for the teaching of engineering and medical disciplines in Hindi in the state of Madhya Pradesh.
The Justice Verma Memorial Lecture was a suitable memorial for a distinguished jurist. He served as India’s 27th Chief Justice from 25 March 1997 till 18 January 1998. In the wake of the 2012 Nirbhaya gang rape case, he served as both the head of the Justice Verma Committee and the chairman of the National Human Rights Commission from 1999 to 2003.
