‘17 courts working in one court’: Justice Gavai on benches of Supreme Court
There are as many as “17 supreme courts” working in the building that is supposed to house the Supreme Court of India, justice BR Gavai remarked on Wednesday, adding that the multitude of courts has led to inconsistent views expressed by the highest court of the land.
There are as many as “17 supreme courts” working in the building that is supposed to house the Supreme Court of India, justice BR Gavai remarked on Wednesday, adding that the multitude of courts has led to inconsistent views expressed by the highest court of the land.
Presiding over a bench with justice Bela M Trivedi, justice Gavai lamented that discipline seems to be the biggest shortcoming of the top court and that the standard of the bar is “perhaps the worst”.
“We both come from high courts and we must say that this is the court where indiscipline is the highest. There are 17 courts working at the same time in this one court. One court takes one view while some other court takes a completely different view. And what do we say about the court registry... the less said the better,” justice Gavai observed.
The judge was referring to the 17 different benches of the top court that deal with scores of similar cases but may come out with different orders.
The bench was seized of a contempt case initiated by its own motion against a retired judicial officer and an advocate-on-record (AoR) of the Supreme Court for filing a petition that bore snide remarks against the Karnataka high court and imputed bias to the judges there.
The bench regretted that the lawyers in the Supreme Court do not want to take responsibility in filing petitions while those in the high courts are far more careful.
“We both come from high courts and the standard of the bar here is perhaps the worst... Here, we see that nobody wants to take responsibility or feel accountable for what they file. A 2,000-page document is filed when only 200 pages are required. This keeps happening in this court and it should stop,” it said.
Senior counsel Dushyant Dave appeared for the Supreme Court AoR (advocate on record) in the matter, and said that he would not justify such acts. Dave said that AoRs, being the only qualified set of advocates that can file petitions in the top court, must take responsibility of what they move, and that the Supreme Court ought to lay down some guidelines. He added that the AoR concerned has furnished his unconditional apology in the matter.
Advocate Abhinav Mukerji, who was appointed as an amicus curiae case to assist the court, submitted that he would be adducing some suggestions on how to ward off such instances in future.
At this point, the bench said that it is willing to lay down certain guidelines with respect to filing of petitions before the apex court. “We have to streamline the system. We are not interested in sending anyone to jail but some improvement must be brought about in the system... Suppose a law clerk gives us a document, should we pronounce it as a judgment without even reading it? We will lay down some guidelines” asked the court.
The bench also deemed it appropriate to hear the presidents of the Supreme Court Bar Association (SCBA) and the Supreme Court AoR Association (SCAoRA) before passing pertinent directions.
“We find that the issue involves filing of proceedings and advocacy before this court. Thus, we feel president of SCBA and SCAoRA should also be heard on the next date,” the bench recorded in its order.
In November, the court had issued show-cause notices of contempt to the AoR as well as the petitioner, taking strong umbrage at the “derogatory” statements made in the petition filed challenging an order of the Karnataka high court in September 2022. It underlined a 1955 judgment of the top court, which cautioned the lawyers against putting their stamps on pleadings without carefully going through them.
Mohan Chandra P, lawyer and a former civil judge, had challenged the appointment of various persons to the posts of the state chief information commissioner and state information commissioner, but his plea was dismissed by the high court not only for lacking merit but also for suppressing clear facts about his antecedents.
The high court also imposed a fine of ₹5 lakh on Mohan, holding that he not only wasted precious time of the court by filing a frivolous petition but also concealed a material fact that he was discharged from the judicial service in 2018 after being found not suitable to hold the post.
Filing his appeal in the top court through AoR Vipin Kumar Jai, Mohan accused the high court of acting with bias and imposing the fine for gaining publicity – contentions that the Supreme Court bench found prima facie contemptuous.
