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The Rafale review petitions have been listed for hearing on Tuesday, 30 April, along with the contempt petition filed against Rahul Gandhi. The petitions will be heard by a three-judge bench led by Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi, along with Justices KM Joseph and Sanjay Kishan Kaul.
On Monday, the Centre requested permission from the court to submit a letter requesting an adjournment of the matter so that they could file an affidavit on it. The apex court did not pass any order on adjournment, though it has allowed the Centre to submit its request. It remains to be seen if the matter will be delayed or heard as per the schedule.
The Supreme Court’s last working day before the summer holidays begin is 10 May, so any delay in the hearing could mean it is not completed before then.
The review petitions have been filed by several of the original petitioners in the case before the Supreme Court last year. These include advocate ML Sharma and AAP MP Sanjay Singh, although the most prominent petition is the one filed by senior advocate Prashant Bhushan, and former NDA cabinet ministers Yashwant Sinha and Arun Shourie.
Their review petition makes the following arguments on why the SC’s decision on 14 December to not interfere with any aspects of the Rafale deal was incorrect:
To prove their points, the petitioners will be allowed to use ‘secret’ documents revealed in news reports by N Ram and other journalists, such as those that show the PMO conducted parallel negotiations on the sovereign guarantee issue, and anti-corruption clauses were dropped at the last minute.
On 10 April, however, the Supreme Court ruled in an interim order that these documents were admissible even though they were classified, and said the government’s claims of privilege were subject to public interest. The same three-judge bench had also come out strongly in favour of press freedom in their decision.
Along with the review petitions, the court is also set to hear a perjury application filed by Bhushan, Sinha and Shourie against the Centre.
BJP MP Meenakshi Lekhi filed the contempt petition against Rahul Gandhi on 12 April, after Gandhi made a comment two days before, in which he said that “Supreme Court has accepted that there is some form of corruption in the Rafale deal and that ‘chowkidar ne chori karwayi hai’ (chowkidar PM Modi has facilitated theft).”
The court initially asked Gandhi to provide an explanation for this comment, with the CJI confirming that the court had said no such thing.
He expressed regret for doing so, but said he stood by his view that Prime Minister Narendra Modi was involved in corrupt practices regarding the deal. He also pointed out that a number of BJP leaders had made misleading statements about the SC’s 14 December verdict, including that it gave the government a ‘clean chit’.
When the matter came up for hearing on 23 April, Gandhi’s lawyer Abhishek Manu Singhvi sought to make these same points and thanked the court for not issuing notice in the matter and taking it up fully.
However, Lekhi’s lawyer, Mukul Rohatgi pressed the matter, and said it was serious. The CJI eventually decided to issue notice, and listed the contempt matter with the review petitions.
Gandhi filed a fresh affidavit on 29 April, making largely the same arguments as his previous affidavit from a week ago.
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