Soon after this, it was announced that the threemember high court bench would deliver its verdict at 3.30 pm on Thursday, September 30.
The September 30 date fixed by the Lucknow bench is of some importance as one of the judges of the three-member bench, Justice D.V.
Sharma, is due to retire on October 1. The other two judges on the bench are Justices S.U. Khan and Sudhir Agarwal.
Preferring not to comment on the merits of the case and offering no major observation during the hearing of arguments by a battery of senior advocates for the contesting parties, a Supreme Court bench of Chief Justice S.H. Kapadia and Justices Aftab Alam and K.S. Radhakrishnan, in a very brief order, rejected two special leave petitions by the former bureaucrat, Mr Ramesh Chandra Tripathi, to allow the contestants a last chance for a negotiated settlement.
“Having considered the detailed arguments advanced in these cases, we are of the view that the special leave petitions deserve to be dismissed.
Accordingly, we hereby pass the following order: the SLPs ... stand dismissed,” said the chief justice of India, reading the order from his diary as the court reassembled at 2 pm.
The only notable observation came from Justice Alam, who said: “We are running out of time because you woke up very late. It (the case) has been going on for the past 50 years.” Justice Alam further asked: “Why were you quiet all these years. Why is this petition only before the judgment is to be pronounced?”
The Suprem Court Bench, which began Tuesday’s hearing on two petitions to defer the Ayodhya title suit ruling at 10.30 am, closed arguments at around 12.30 pm, after which the judges retired to chambers for consultation.While the judges refrained from making any observations on the merits of the two petitions, it was not convinced with the arguments of senior advocate Mukul Rohtagi, representing Mr Tripathi, that there was still a chance for a negotiated settlement, as rival counsel said all such efforts in the past two decades made by five Prime Ministers — Rajiv Gandhi, V.P.
Singh, Chandra Shekhar, P.V. Narasimha Rao and Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee — had failed.
A firm commitment by the Attorney-General, Mr Goolam E. Vahanvati, on behalf of the Centre that the government was “bound” to implement the court’s verdict clinched the issue for allowing the High Court to go ahead with the pronouncement.
“The most preferred solution is through settlement but that has not taken place.
The uncertainty, which is there, cannot continue. We can’t keep the law and order machinery in sustained animation,” the attorney-gener
al submitted.He said the government had taken a “proactive” stand before the Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court in 1994 that it would prefer a negotiated settlement, but if that was not possible then it would abide by the court verdict.
“The mandate in the 1994 judgment is for implementation of the final decision of the suit. This is what we have to do. If there is any possibility of settlement, we welcome it, (but) we don’t want the uncertainty to continue,” Mr Vahanvati said.
No comments:
Post a Comment