New Delhi: Supreme Court lawyer Utsav Bains Monday denied senior advocate Prashant Bhushan’s claims that he met CJI Ranjan Gogoi twice before he filed his affidavit in SC in which he had alleged a larger conspiracy to frame Gogoi in a sexual harassment case. Bains said Bhushan was playing “cheaply” to “discredit” him.
Bhushan has made the claims in an interview to online news portal The Wire.
“This story is imagination of PB sir, I never told him I met CJI, I told him it’s a conspiracy. Pls ask him to prove that I told him that I met CJI,” wrote Bains in a Facebook post.
“He says he recorded my conversation why didn’t he record this call when I told him it’s a conspiracy – the first call. I reposed faith and trust in him thinking he’ll stand for truth. When he told me not to be in contact I told him he’s a suspicious person and the relationship has become toxic due to his suspicion and I don’t wish to be in touch either (sic),” Bains wrote.
‘Got backstabbed’
Bhushan told The Wire that Bains had called him on 20 April, soon after the sexual harassment allegations against the CJI became public and before Bains published his accusations on Facebook, to say that “he had met the CJI the previous night (April 19, 2019)” and that Justice Gogoi could still be “saved”.
Bhushan said he had known Bains for the last few years as someone who was interested in working with him on human rights cases.
“I respect him, but we can agree to disagree with grace but he’s playing so cheaply to discredit me. This is unfortunate and unbecoming of a man I reposed faith in,” Bains wrote in his Facebook post.
“… I have beaten up people who have abused him, donated 90 per cent of my earnings of a month to crowd fund his 25 lakh fine and lived in difficulty as a struggling lawyer, even prepared myself to commit contempt if he’s sent to jail for contempt and all I got was backstabbed because we didn’t agree with each other.”
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‘My life under danger’
Clarifying the controversy surrounding the Jaguar car in which he entered the Supreme Court premises on 22 April, Bains said, “A night before I was informed that my life was under immense danger because of the people I had named, around 3 am I walked a km from a friend’s place, took an auto, checked into a hotel, prepared the affidavit, took a Jaguar taxi, informed the SC registry that my life is under danger and that I be given protection of being a witness under the SC directions on Witness Program, a case I had argued in SC, and I be allowed to get my vehicle inside and then I was allowed.”
He also mentioned that the “hotel CCTV will show him coming in an auto around 3 am and leaving in a Jaguar taxi in morning to SC”.
Bhushan in his interview said that a senior advocate, Nina Gupta Bhasin, told him that she saw Bains outside gate E of the SC on the afternoon of 22 April. “She told me that while she was waiting for a car to pick her up, a Jaguar taxi had blocked all other cars. The taxi was stuck there as the security personnel did not allow it entry into the court premises as the car did not have an SC sticker,” he said.
Bhushan told The Wire that when Nina enquired with the security guards, she saw Bains come out of the taxi. “She heard him tell the guards that he was Utsav Bains and that he was called by the CJI.”
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