India and France got into a deal in 2015 for the procurement of Rafale fighter jets.
The Supreme Court on Friday reserved order on Rafale review petitions against its December 14, 2018 judgement upholding the Rafale fighter jet deal.
Earlier on Thursday, three petitioners, former Union Ministers Yashwant Sinha and Arun Shourie and activist-lawyer Prashant Bhushan had claimed in the Supreme Court that the Centre played fraud upon the court to obtain favourable order in the Rafale fighter jet case.
The petitioners filed a rejoinder stating the December 14, 2018 verdict should be subjected to a review as it was based on “multiple falsehoods and suppression of material and relevant information”.
The top court had dismissed the plea filed by Sinha, Shourie and Bhushan, who sought investigation into alleged irregularities in the Rafale deal.
The petitioners said since the government was suppressing information, they have sought production of relevant and material documents before the court.
Bhushan on Friday pointed out that a non-existent CAG report was referred to in the December verdict. He also claimed that three out of the seven-member International Negotiating Team (INT) had also raised objections to the inflated pricing of the Rafale aircraft.
Attorney General KK Venugopal, however, cited a CAG report to argue India got Rafale at a cheaper price. “Will this court sit on the computation of the prices? And what happens thereafter? Will this court then fix the prices of the aircraft and avionics?” questioned Venugopal.
The AG, on behalf of the Centre, argued that the deal was a matter of national security and cannot be examined by any court.
“This (Rafale fighter) is not for ornamentation. This is an essential requirement for protection of each and every one of us… Nowhere in the world will any such matter be brought before the court,” KK Venugopal, the centre’s top law officer, told the judges.
On May 4, the government filed a fresh affidavit in the Supreme Court in the Rafale case, opposing the reopening of the whole matter by contending that the petitioners were attempting to get “a fishing and roving inquiry ordered”.
The Centre further said that monitoring of progress by the PMO cannot be construed as interference or parallel negotiations.
A three-judge bench of the Supreme Court had on 10 April admitted three documents connected to the Dassault Rafale fighter jet deal as evidence in the review petitions and dismissed the Centre’s “preliminary objections” to them.
The Supreme Court on December 14 last year gave a clean chit to the Centre on the procurement of 36 Rafale fighter jets from France.
A three-Judge bench headed by Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi dismissed all the petitions and said that no probe was required.
Agencies
