The Patna High Court has expunged the personal aspersions made by a District Magistrate, sitting as an appellate authority under the Bihar Public Grievance Redressal Act, against a complainant, a Sanskrit scholar and former Vice-Chancellor. While declining to disturb the order on the drainage grievance itself, the Court held that a quasi-judicial authority must decide on facts and law and cannot attack a litigant’s personal character, invoking A.M. Mathur and the ‘good name’ passage from Shakespeare’s Othello.
The petitioner sought the Rs 4 lakh COVID ex-gratia payment for his father’s death, which had been rejected because no RT-PCR or antigen test was done. The Patna High Court accepted that the absence of a test report is not by itself conclusive, but held that the relaxation still requires reliable corroborative proof that the death was due to COVID, and dismissed the petition where the hospital record was silent and the death certificate placed the death at home.
