Five SC judges recuse from Navlakha case in four days

None Of Them Gives Reason For Doing So


Justice S Ravindra Bhat on Thursday became the fifth Supreme Court judge to decline to hear activist Gautam Navlakha’s plea for quashing of an FIR against him in the Elgar Parishad case.


Navlakha had moved the Supreme Court against the Bombay high court’s September 13 verdict that refused to quash the FIR lodged against him in the case for alleged Maoist links after noting that there was prima facie substance in the case.

With Navlakha’s protection from arrest ending on Friday, the SC agreed to his counsel senior advocate Abhishek Manu Singhvi’s request that his plea for scrapping the FIR be listed on Friday.

Navlakha’s petition was first listed on September 30 before a bench headed by CJI Ranjan Gogoi who recused himself from hearing the case. His plea was then listed before a bench of Justices N V Ramana, R Subhash Reddy and B R Gavai and all three judges recused themselves and asked the CJI to list the case before another bench.

The recusal by the judges is fairly unprecedented. The case was assigned to a bench of Justices Arun Mishra, Vineet Saran and S Ravindra Bhat. When the case was taken up for hearing, Justice Bhat became the fifth judge to recuse himself in four days.

None of the five judges gave any reason for their withdrawing from hearing the case, but Singhvi said Justice Bhat may have appeared as a lawyer for the organisation with which Navlakha was associated.


‘Justice Bhat’s decision to recuse understandable’

It is quite understandable that Justice Bhat recused himself either because he had appeared as counsel for or was a member of People’s Union for Democratic Rights,” Singhvi said.

Judges have recused when there is either a conflict of interest or in cases where they had appeared for any one of the parties while practising as a lawyer. Recently, Justice U U Lalit recused himself from the Ayodhya land dispute case as he had appeared for one of the persons accused in the Babri Masjid demolition case.

Retired Justice Markandey Katju had recused from Novartis case on grounds that he had written an article on grant of pharma patents.

Former CJI S H Kapadia had expressed unwillingness to hear a case involving Vedanta on the ground that he owned some shares of the company but the lawyers had insisted that they did not have any objection if a bench comprising him adjudicated the dispute.