DNA Edit: SC clears the air

The conspiracy theorists who smelt “wrongdoing” in the death of Judge BH Loya have to not only accept defeat, but also grapple with an angry Supreme Court, which has taken “strong exception to the insinuations made that one individual controls the judiciary”.

While dismissing the petitions seeking independent probe into Judge Loya’s death, the three-judge bench headed by the Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra said: “There is no reason to disbelieve the sequence of events leading to the death as narrated by the four judicial officers namely Shrikant Kulkarni, Shriram Modak, R Rathi and Vijay Kumar Barde and the assertions of Bombay High Court Justices Bhushan Gawai and Sunil Sukhre. In the run-up to the verdict there were at least 10 tumultuous hearings, with some of the finest legal minds trying to impress upon the bench that the late Loya died under “mysterious circumstances”.

Apart from calling the petitions “scandalous”, the bench also emphasised upon the fact that “business rivalries [ought] to be resolved in market and political rivalries in the hall of democracy. It is the court’s duty to protect law”. Loya’s death had snowballed into a major political issue and a rallying cry for the Congress-led Opposition. It had even created fault lines among the top judiciary with four senior-most judges going public with their displeasure over how CJI Misra was assigning cases of far-reaching consequences.

Will the Opposition now relent and not breathe fire over a hollow cause? Happy that its stand has been vindicated, the BJP wants Rahul Gandhi to apologise for exploiting the judiciary and tarnishing the reputation of party president Amit Shah. Making a mountain out of a molehill will not help the Congress to wrest power in the 2019 elections.