New Delhi, March 13
In a further setback to Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav on the assets issue, the Supreme Court today declined to entertain his application for modification of its order for a CBI probe, saying once a case has got finality, the only remedy available to the affected parties was to file a review petition.
A bench of justice A. R. Lakshmanan and justice Altamas Kabir, which had ordered the CBI probe into the assets of Mulayam and his family members, told his counsel Altaf Ahmed that his client could file the review petition and even a curative petition after that but not an application for modification of the judgement.
The court said there was no provision in the Supreme Court’s rules of procedures to permit hearing of an interlocutory application of review in the open court.
Altaf Ahmed, a former additional solicitor-general, while mentioning the petition before the bench, sought a direction to the registry to get the application registered for hearing. He said the registry had refused to accept it unless there was an express direction from the bench.
Rejecting the plea of Mulayam’s counsel that the court under its inherent powers could still reconsider the matter, the bench said, “there are rules…if we allow this, it will create chaos… reviews are not listed in the court”.
When Altaf Ahmed insisted that in the past it had been done in a number of cases, the bench said, “there is no power to list it (for hearing) in the court.”
The bench even sought the opinion of former attorney general Soli Sorabjee on the issue, who was present in the court in some other case. He said there was a practice of filing applications for hearing in open court for clarification of the judgement but that should not be in the “garb of the review”.
As per the apex court rules, a review petition could only be listed for hearing in the chamber before the same bench, which had passed the judgement. While considering a review petition, the bench would only examine whether any factual or legal errors had cropped up in the judgement.
The last remedy available for the parties in a case is curative petition, which is heard by a bench of four or five judges but again they would also look on the factual or legal errors, if any.
Mulayam in his petition had sought modification of the apex court order to the extent that the investigation should be first done by the Income Tax Department and only after its report a further inquiry be held by a retired Supreme Court or high court judge.
He had also said till UP Assembly elections, the operation of the order should be put on hold, claiming that the PIL on which the probe was ordered was politically motivated and was filed at the behest of Congress president Sonia Gandhi. Under the UPA coalition, the CBI was not functioning independently, he had alleged.
