High-profile corporate disputes coupled with the turf war between the judiciary and the executive engaged the Supreme Court in the year 2010 which even saw the Prime Minister facing searching questions for his alleged “inaction” in the multi-crore 2G spectrum scam. The 2G issue did not only lead to the resignation of A. Raja as telecom minister but also hit hard Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as his office had to explain to the top court about his alleged “inaction” and “delay” in taking decision for granting sanction to prosecute the DMK leader.
While the logjam in Parliament over the National Democratic Alliance’s demand for a joint parliamentary committee (JPC) probe into the scam continued, the top court, which had severely pulled up Mr Raja for bypassing the Prime Minister, decided to monitor the probe by directing the CBI to widen its compass to cover the grant of licences by both the NDA and the UPA regimes between 2001-2007.
However, before the spectrum scam which according to the CAG report caused a loss of `1.76 lakh crore to the exchequer dragged Prime Minister into the controversy, the UPA government was in spot over the public distribution system (PDS) in the top court which castigated it for allowing foodgrains to rot in godown instead of distributing it to the poor.
What irked the top court were the remarks of Union agriculture minister Sharad Pawar who had said that the judges had only suggested and not ordered the government to distribute foodgrains free of cost to the hungry. While the court was lashing out at the government for failing to properly implement the social welfare measures, the Prime Minister utilised the public platform to sent a signal to judiciary to refrain from interfering in policy matters.
However, fresh embarrassment came to him and his government when a bench of Chief Justice of India S.H. Kapadia questioned the appointment of controversial bureaucrat P.J. Thomas as the Central Vigilance Commissioner despite a corruption case pending against him in a Kerala court.
The top court is awaiting the government’s response on whether Mr Thomas, who was a secretary in the telecom ministry when the spectrum scam surfaced, meets the criteria of person of “impeccable integrity” to don the office of CVC, more so when his name was not cleared by Leader of the Opposition Sushma Swaraj.
Mr Thomas might have survived for a while but another constitutional functionary, Prasar Bharti chief B.S. Lalli, failed to secure any reprieve from the top court despite his legal blusters to it and ended up in suspension on the orders of President Pratibha Patil in charges of corruption.
The judiciary had its own moments of embarrassment involving open spat between sitting supreme court judge H.L. Gokhale and former Chief Justice of India K.G. Balakrishnan with the two contradicting each other.
While Mr Gokhale insisted that Mr Raja’s name was there in the communication to Mr Balakrishnan as CJI, the latter denied it.
The letter was written to bring to the then CJI’s notice that Mr Raja had allegedly tried to influence Madras high court judge R. Reghupathy (since retired) in a bail matter. The image of judiciary also got the beating as names of judicial officers and judges, including one from the top court, surfaced for their alleged misdemeanour in the UP provident fund scam.