Sc Judge Witness To Cash-At-Door?

SC Judge Witness To Cash-At-Door? 9 Jan 2009, 0423 hrs IST, TNN NEW DELHI: A judicial inquiry has conceded that a Supreme Court judge might have been present in the house of Punjab and Haryana High Court judge Nirmaljit Kaur on the fateful evening when a bag containing Rs 15 lakh was delivered at her door on August 13, 2008. This sensational disclosure was made in a three-page letter written by another high court judge, Nirmal Yadav, on Wednesday to Chief Justice of India K G Balakrishnan, responding to his notice of the inquiry finding that the money was actually meant for her. The notice issued on December 25 was accompanied by the report of a three-judge committee appointed by the CJI to probe the August 13 delivery of cash at Justice Kaur’s residence. In her reply, which is in possession of TOI, Justice Yadav said, “The committee itself records that a judge of the SC and a senior judge of the high court may have been present in the house at the time of delivery of the cash.” According to Justice Yadav, the committee’s finding on the presence of two other judges on the spot was borne out by call records related to them. Following the cash delivery, the SC judge’s son, for instance, made five calls to lawyer Sanjeev Bansal, who is alleged to have sent the money at the instance of businessman Ravinder Singh. Justice Yadav is aggrieved that the panel, however, did not draw any adverse inference against Justice Kaur for denying their presence at her house. “In spite of clinching evidence which establishes the falsity of the statement of Justice Nirmaljit Kaur with respect to the absence of these judges at her residence at the time of receipt of cash, the committee considered it unnecessary to go into that question, assuming that the enquiry was solely directed against me.” Justice Yadav went on to allege that “it is a patent case of travesty of justice that the judge from whose custody the cash is recovered should continue to sit on the bench and I should be made a scapegoat only because a judge of the SC and a senior judge of the high court are found to be interfering in the investigation and in creating a wrongful assumption by the committee that the enquiry is only required to be conducted against me.” Without naming the SC judge, Justice Yadav added, “Almost two decades old liaison between the judge of SC and the judge at whose residence cash is delivered, has been a talk of the town for all these years. It is on this ground that the SC judge’s wife sought divorce.” Listing what she called were “only some of the anomalies apparent on the face of the report,” Justice Yadav asked the CJI to supply her with the documents mentioned in it so that she could give her complete reply. “From the reading of the report without the documents,” she said, “all I can say is that I am shocked at the lopsided enquiry conducted by the committee.” The committee, appointed under the in house procedure of enquiry, consisted of Allahabad high court chief justice H L Gokhale, Gujarat HC chief justice K S Radhakrishnan and Delhi HC judge Madan Lokur.

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