ND Tiwari

New Delhi, April 27 (PTI): Veteran Congress leader N.D. Tiwari was today ordered to undergo a DNA test on a paternity suit by Delhi High Court, which said police force could be used if he didn’t give his blood sample.

The judges said non-implementation of judicial orders would make courts a “laughing stock”, in reference to the leader’s earlier refusal to give his blood sample.

The bench of acting Chief Justice A.K. Sikri and Justice Rajiv Sahai Endlaw set aside a September 2011 order of a single judge who had said that an earlier ruling asking Tiwari to undergo the DNA test for ascertaining the paternity of Rohit Shekhar was “unimplementable and unenforceable”. Shekhar, 32, claims to be Tiwari’s son.

“We therefore allow this appeal (by Shekhar) and set aside the order dated September 23, 2011... We further deem it necessary to now clarify the procedure to be followed for compliance of the direction contained in the order dated December 23, 2010,” the judges said today, and imposed a cost of Rs 25,000 on the 86-year-old leader.

“Upon Respondent 1 (Tiwari) continuing to defy the order, the single judge shall be entitled to take police assistance and use of reasonable force for compliance thereof,” the judges said in their 31-page order.

The bench held that the single judge’s ruling last September was not envisaged in any statutory provision governing civil litigation. That judge had said the 2010 order asking Tiwari to give blood sample was unimplementable as it was fraught with physical coercion and intrusion on his rights under Article 21 (right to life) of the Constitution.

The judges then stressed the need to enforce court orders. They said if an illegal occupant could be physically removed by the police following a court order, why couldn’t a person be forced to give blood samples in compliance of a judicial order with the use of force.

Referring to judgments of the Supreme Court, the bench said judicial orders were “intended” to be complied with as a court would never pass an “ineffective injunction order”.

“To say that the court could issue a direction for DNA testing but not implement or enforce the same, has the tendency of making the law and the court, a laughing stock.”

“The perception that the law, as Mr Bumble (in Oliver Twist) said, is an ass — ‘an idiot’ will be cemented, if the courts themselves hold their own orders to be unimplementable and unenforceable,” the court said, while criticising the judgment of the single-judge bench.

The bench said there was no need for the single judge bench to have entertained the plea of Tiwari when the predecessor judge had already taken a view on December 23, 2010, and ordered that the Congress leader would have to go undergo the DNA test.