New Delhi: Even as the Supreme Court reopens on Monday after a 7-week summer recess, all eyes are on the judgment reserved by the Bench headed by Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi on May 10 on the Rafale fighter jet deal. No date is yet fixed for the verdict on the petitions of former union ministers Yashwant Sinha and Arun Shourie and others, challenging the clean chit of the court to the Rafale deal on December 14. Clubbed with the verdict is the decision reserved by the Chief Justice-headed Bench on the contempt of court by Congress President Rahul Gandhi for misquoting the Court endorsing his charge of "Modi chor hai" for which he has already apologised.
Only once the Court agrees to hear the review petition that the real firworks will begin once again on the Rafale issue. The government has asked the Court to throw out the petition since it was based on the documents "stolen" from the defence ministry, citing serious repurcussions on the government''s functioning if it becomes a precedent.
Also coming in focus on reopening of the courts is a new controversy over appointments of the higher judiciary judges and the correspondence exchanged between the Apex Court and the Centre during the recess. Transparency in the appointment of the judges will once again be debated hotly.
CJI Gogoi is sitting with Justices Deepak Gupta and Aniruddha Bose on Monday in Court No 1 and listed before them are 46 petitions. Early this week, he created a new roster for allocation of work to the judges that now provides for four other sendiormost judges besides him hearing the public interest litigations and letter petitions. The judges who will now hear the PILs are Justice S A Bobde, who is to become the CJI in November after Gogoi retires, Justic N V Ramana, Justice Arun Mishra and Justice Rohinton Fali Nariman.
The CJI will, however, have the say in deciding who hears which PILs. Yet another key change in the roster is regarding the election matters that so far used to be heard exclusively only by the Bench headed by the CJI as they will be also heard now by the Bench headed by Justice Bobde. The subject-wise roster system for allocation of work to the judges was introduced by then Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra in February last year after four seniormost judges accusing him of arbitrarily allocating cases to the "junior judges." Gogoi was one of the four judges objecting to this arbitrariness.
