Their petition in Supreme Court terms Venkaiah Naidu’s order as being ‘motivated by political consideration beyond the constitutional scheme’.
New Delhi: Two Congress MPs Monday moved the Supreme Court challenging Rajya Sabha chairperson Venkaiah Naidu’s rejection of the impeachment motion by 71 opposition MPs against Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra.
In their petition, mentioned in the court of the second most senior judge Jasti Chelameswar, MPs Pratap Singh Bajwa and Amee Harshadray Yajnik have termed Naidu’s order as being “motivated by political consideration beyond the constitutional scheme”.
This, the petition adds, is buttressed by the fact that “one of the charges against the CJI is that he has been partial in assigning politically sensitive cases pertaining to the ruling party before particular benches of this Hon’ble Court in order to get a predetermined outcome”.
After senior advocate and MP Kapil Sibal mentioned the matter before the bench headed by Chelameswar, the court told him to come back Tuesday, when the court could take a call whether the petition should be assigned to a bench.
The reason Sibal mentioned the case before Chelameswar’s bench was made clear by Sibal himself, who told the court that since the case relates to CJI Misra, he couldn’t mention it before the CJI to demand a date of hearing.
“The manner in which the Vice-President rejected the notice for impeachment raises serious constitutional issues. It involves interpretation of pertinent constitutional provisions,” Sibal told the court.
On 23 April, Vice-President Naidu, who is also the chairman of the ‘House of Elders’, had rejected the motion, holding it was “neither legal nor desirable or proper” to admit it.
In their petition, the two MPs have said that the chairman couldn’t have refused to admit the motion by stating that in his view the charges were not made out since this effectively meant that he was going into the merits of the charges.
“That merits of the charges are for the inquiry committee to investigate and present a report on. It is finally for the House to deliberate and decide on the motion which cannot be pre-empted in the manner as performed by the chairman, Rajya Sabha,” reads the petition.
“In this constitutional and statutory background, it is impermissible for the Hon’ble Chairman to interdict this process by becoming a super arbiter and proceed to reject a Motion at the stage of Section 3(1)(b) on the ground that the proved misbehavior is not made out,” it says.
Referring to the reasons given by Naidu, particularly where he says that the “charges against the Chief Justice of India have not been made out and that the Chief Justice on these facts can ever be held guilty of misbehavior”, the petition says that “these are mere words” and that the motion contained detailed allegations which were “supported by documents”.
The petitioners then go on to say that “none” of the reasons given by the chairman “carry any weight, or are legally tenable” and they “deserve to be set aside for being wholly extraneous and ultra vires the provisions of the Constitution of India and the Judges (Inquiry) Act”.
The petitioners have sought issuance of directions to the Rajya Sabha chairman to admit the motion and constitute a committee to investigate the grounds on which the removal of CJI Misra is sought.
They have also petitioned that the order passed by Naidu be set aside.