SC likely to face contempt charge
Sidharth
by Sh. Manoj Mitta | TNN
New Delhi: In a strange twist to the assets controversy, the Supreme
Court has opened itself to the charge of committing contempt of the
Delhi high court. For, rather than disclosing by the September 30
deadline whether its judges have been filing declarations of their
assets, all that the SC communicated to the RTI applicant was its
intention to appeal against the HC verdict.
In a letter that was posted on October 1, a day after the HC
deadline, the SC registry told applicant Subhash Chandra Agrawal that
though the appeal “has been kept ready for filing”, it was unable to
make headway because the HC would reopen after the Dasara vacation
only on Monday. Apparently, the idea is to appeal against Justice S
Ravindra Bhat’s September 2 verdict before a larger HC bench. The
letter ended by saying, “We shall communicate with you further as soon
as the appeal is filed.”
For the present, as Agrawal’s counsel Prashant Bhushan pointed
out, “the SC stands in contempt of the HC order,” which directed it to
confirm by September 30 whether its judges have been filing
declarations of theirs before the Chief Justice of India in terms of a
1997 resolution.
“More importantly, its disinclination to disclose the status of
compliance with the 1997 resolution flies in the face of its own
public resolution of August 27 that its judges were willing to make
their assets public,” Bhushan said. Technically, the SC could have
ignored the September 30 deadline only if it had obtained a stay on
the HC verdict by that date. Since judges have anyway resolved to post
their assets on the SC website, the sticking point is the CJI’s
insistence that his office was exempt from the purview of RTI.