NEW DELHI: Supreme Court on Wednesday asked Justice Yashwant Varma, facing a removal motion in the Lok Sabha, how he was prejudiced by the Speaker constituting a panel to inquire into the charges of cash being found at his residence as he pleaded that it should have been done in consultation with the Rajya Sabha chairman. Senior advocate Mukul Rohatgi said that as per the Judges Inquiry Act, 1968, if the motion for removal is presented in both Houses on the same day, the inquiry committee was to be constituted jointly by the Speaker and the Chairman. However, the Speaker unilaterally constituted the panel. tnn
SC disagrees with Justice Varma over RS notice
Rohatgi, aided by senior advocates Sidharth Luthra and Sidharth Agarwal, argued on behalf of Justice Varma for little over an hour raising three issues – that then RS Chairman Jagdeep Dhankhar had found the motion moved by more than 50 MPs in the Upper House to be in order, RS deputy chairperson had no authority to reject the motion on Aug 11, and that the inquiry committee should have been constituted jointly.The bench of Justices Dipankar Datta and Satish Chandra Sharma said it prima facie disagreed with the arguments on two points and posted the hearing for Thursday to hear Rohatgi on how the constitution of the inquiry committee by the LS Speaker vitiated the process.Responding to Justice Varma’s charge that the law stipulated only the RS Chair to admit or reject a notice for removal motion, solicitor general Tushar Mehta was able to convince the court that when the post of Chairperson was vacant, which was when Dhankar resigned on July 21 hours after receiving the removal motion, the deputy chairperson is constitutionally capable of discharging all the duties.He said the RS Chairman had neither scrutinised the motion nor taken a decision to admit it as is being wrongly projected by Justice Varma. “The secretary general of RS undertook scrutiny of the motion presented by 62 MPs and notice of the motion was presented before the RS deputy chairperson along with the report of the secretary general showing that the motion was defective on many counts,” he said.In any case, the very purpose of the MPs who moved the motion in RS was to initiate proceedings under section 3 of the Act for removal of Justice Varma, which is fully satisfied due to admission of similar motion by the LS Speaker, Mehta said.On Justice Varma’s plea that reference to the CJI-constituted in-house committee, which found him liable, in the Speaker’s order has rendered the inquiry biased against him, the LS secretariat in its affidavit said the Speaker merely mentioned the in-house inquiry report and it would not be correct to say that the Speaker had relied on it.The Speaker-constituted inquiry panel headed by Justice Aravind Kumar has already supplied to Justice Varma the memo of charges along with the evidence, mainly comprising of the videos of the burning cash recorded by Delhi Police and Delhi Fire Service personnel on the night of March 14-15 while dousing a fire in a room inside the judge’s Lutyens Zone bungalow. It has permitted Justice Varma to respond to the charges by Jan-end.
