Shashwati Chowdhury
Published on: June 3, 2022 at 15:24 IST
Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar has sought for the calling of a joint meeting of Haryana and Punjab under the chairmanship of Union Home Minister Amit Shah with the Union Law Minister on board to move forward towards resolution. Khattar is reiterating the state’s demand for the creation of a separate High Court at Chandigarh.
Khattar said that he is writing in the context of discussions at the conference of chief ministers and chief justices on April 30 of this year, in a communication to the Union home minister. Since its inception in 1966, Punjab, Chandigarh, and Haryana have a common High Court.
The Haryana government has previously requested the establishment of a separate High Court in Chandigarh at various points in time. The establishment of a separate High Court in Chandigarh has also been approved by resolutions passed by the Haryana assembly on March 14, 2002, December 15, 2005, and May 4, 2017, the chief minister stated on May 26.
According to Khattar, Article 214 of the Constitution mandates that each state have its own high court. Even in the states that were created in the past ten years, separate high courts have been established. The chief minister said that states significantly smaller than Haryana, such Sikkim, Tripura, Manipur, and Meghalaya, have separate high courts.
A committee of four judges was constituted by the Punjab and Haryana High Court in 2015 to consider a communication from the then-Union Law Minister, DV Sadananda Gowda, seeking the establishment of a separate high court for Haryana.