Mr. R. Galletti, Joint Magistrate of Gudur (Andhra) hit the headlines with his eccentric behaviour towards satyagrahis in the individual satyagraha movement in which they courted arrest by shouting anti-war slogans. He lectured to them in his court, attended their meetings and gave them advice and in one instance allowed them to shout anti-war slogans and told them they could march to Delhi.
FEBRUARY 3, 1941
Magistrate on the flying trapeze
MR. GALLETTI WHEN HE STARTED HIS ADVENTURES AMONG satyagrahis was something of a joke. And he obviously enjoyed himself. Possibly he does so still; we do not know. But the public is no longer amused by his antics nor can it overlook him as a harmless bore. For, unlike most private bores, Mr. Galletti is pleasantly conscious of his authority as dispenser of justice – of his own peculiar brand – and of the magisterial privilege of laying about him with the butt-end of abuse when the pistol of argument misfires. The law of contempt, if not divinity, doth still hedge a magistrate; which no doubt explains why the amenities in Mr. Galletti’s Court have been mostly unilateral, though possibly his eccentricities suggested a touch of that inspiration before which men have always done reverence. The ancients, Mr. Galletti will remember, pictured Justice as blind, they never gave her squint eyes. But he himself does not seem to have heard of the elementary rule that judge and prosecutor should not be one; nor of the other commonplace that this judge should not become a law unto himself any more than the man whom he tries. In his evangelical zeal for saving the souls of the politically misguided, he seems to have thought himself permitted alternately to pray and curse, threaten and cajole, sneer and grow maudlin, impale his victim on Morton’s fork and souse him in the purest milk of satyagraha a la Galletti. And now, not content with such easy success, he has turned peripatetic tub-thumper, shouting through his big megaphone; and the irony of it is that while he derides the satyagrahis for repeating somebody else’s slogans, he himself mouths with infinite relish slogans which are far older and far less true. As he is obviously unable to see the impropriety of a magistrate functioning like a vaudeville artist, it is high time that the Government transferred him to a sphere more suited to his talents and tastes. To Mr. Galletti himself a word of friendly advice would not be amiss. As a keen student of the old fabulists, he should be familiar with the story of our simian cousin in the Panchatantra which, in its zeal for setting the world to rights, came to grief with a wedge. Moral: the cobbler should stick to his last.
Reference:
The First 100
A Selection of Editorials, 1878-1978, THE HINDU, VOLUME I