Rafale hearing: Supreme Court gives Centre till 4 May to reply to review petitions, defers case to 6 May

The Supreme Court on Tuesday issued a formal notice to the Centre on the review petitions filed against its 14 December judgment on the Rafale fighter jet deal. Earlier, Attorney-General KK Venugopal had sought four weeks to file a reply to the pleas.

The bench of Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi, Justices Deepak Gupta and Sanjiv Khanna gave the Central government till 4 May to respond and deferred the hearing to 6 May.

The court was set to hear a batch of review petitions, one filed by former Union ministers Yashwant Sinha, Arun Shourie and activist lawyer Prashant Bhushan and two others by Aam Aadmi Party leader Sanjay Singh and advocate Vineet Dhanda.

On 10 April, in a setback to the Centre, the Supreme Court had allowed the review petitions — which seek re-examination of its Rafale case verdict — to be heard even though the government had claimed that they were based on “leaked documents”. The court had dismissed the government’s preliminary objections claiming “privilege” over these documents.

The Centre had submitted that three privileged documents were unauthorisedly removed from the Ministry of Defence and used by the petitioners to support their review petitions against the December 2018 judgement of the top court, which had dismissed all pleas challenging the procurement of 36 Rafale fighter jets from France.

The top court had rejected the Centre’s objections that those documents were not admissible as evidence under Section 123 of the Indian Evidence Act, and no one can produce them in court without the permission of the department concerned as they are also protected under the Official Secrets Act. The court, however, had noted that all three documents were in “public domain” and published by The Hindu “in consonance with the constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech”.

The Rafale fighter jet is a twin-engine, medium multi-role combat aircraft manufactured by French aerospace company Dassault Aviation. In 2015, India and France had signed a deal to procure 36 fighter jets, delivery of which is expected to begin in September.

In the December 2018 verdict, the Supreme Court had said there was no occasion to doubt the decision-making process in the procurement of the 36 Rafale jets from France, dismissing all the petitions seeking an investigation into the alleged irregularities in the Rs 58,000-crore deal.

The top court had said there was no substantial evidence of commercial favouritism to any private entity.

With inputs from agencies