The Supreme Court has rejected an appeal by a certain P Rajan, filed after the Delhi high court had scrapped his petition seeking the disqualification of Congress president Sonia Gandhi as a member of parliament.
The Supreme Court has rejected an appeal by a certain P Rajan, filed after the Delhi high court had scrapped his petition seeking the disqualification of Congress president Sonia Gandhi as a member of parliament for receiving an award from the Belgian government. The Delhi high court had also, in January, fined him Rs10,000 for misleading the country through his petition.
When Rajan’s plea came up before a bench headed by newly sworn-in Chief Justice SH Kapadia, praying that the Rs10,000 fine be dropped, the bench refused to entertain his plea and, in fact, remarked that it might well enhance the amount.
The amount so recovered from petitioners who file frivolous public interest litigations (PIL) would be used for strengthening the court’s infrastructure, the bench said.
Rajan’s counsel Sebastian Paul submitted it wasn’t a PIL but an appeal challenging the Delhi high court’s verdict. Paul said Gandhi incurred a ‘disqualification’ from being an MP as she had accepted the Order of Leopold, the second highest civilian award of Belgium, and an honorary doctorate degree during her visit to that country in November 2006.
Earlier, the Election Commission had rejected Rajan’s plea saying the Order of Leopold is a decoration, not an award.
Incidentally, chief justice Kapadia statements against frivolous PILs, made soon after he was sworn in chief justice of India (CJI) on Wednesday, was a reiteration of the Supreme Court’s assertion, made in January, that the trend of filing frivolous PILs should be checked by imposing hefty costs on persons who filed such PILs.
Taking a strong exception to the growing misuse of PILs being filed and to reduce the chances of PILs being filed for personal or even pecuniary reasons, the Supreme Court had issued detailed guidelines for accepting a PIL, whether in the SC or in the high courts.
The apex court had then also imposed a whopping fine of Rs1 lakh on a lawyer, Balwant Singh Chaufal, for filing a PIL against the appointment of the advocate general in the Uttarakhand high court.
The PIL was born in 1982 as a mechanism to make available justice to poorest of the poor, who often had no representation in the courts, after then SC Justice PN Bhagwati converted a postcard into a plea. The postcard had sought the court’s help, saying imprisoned petty criminals in Bhagalpur, Bihar, had been blinded.
The PIL jurisprudence soon expanded, often benefiting the poorer sections of society. But in recent years, it had become something of an epidemic with all and sundry filing a PIL for all sorts of cases, leading to a desire to curb frivolous PIL that took away the courts’ time and increased the number of cases.
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