Shruti Sethi, Hidayatullah National Law University, Raipur
Dr. Subramanian Swamy is an Indian academician, politician, activist and economist.He was the President of the Janata Party which merged with BJP on 11 August 2013. He has previously served as member of the Planning Commission of India and Cabinet Minister of India and has also written extensively on foreign affairs of India dealing largely with China, Pakistan and Israel.
He had filed a petition in the 2G spectrum scam, which has been described as India’s biggest swindle so far against Mr. Chidambaram the then Finance Minister (in 2008) when the Telecom Minister A Raja allegedly broke the rules to help companies who were ineligible to land valuable mobile network licenses at throwaway prices. The CBI is probing the scam in which 14 people and several companies, including the promoters of some of India’s biggest telecom companies, have been accused of conspiring to rig the process of allocation of licenses. The high-profile case is also being investigated by a Joint Parliamentary Committee, which has 20 members from the Lok Sabha and 10 from the Rajya Sabha.
On August 24, 2012, the Bench, headed by Justice Singhvi rejected the petitions filed by Dr. Subramanian Swamy and the Centre for Public Interest Litigation (CPIL) seeking a CBI probe into Mr. P. Chidambaram’s (Union Minister for Finance as of today) alleged role in the 2G spectrum allocation scam.’ It also dismissed Dr. Swamy’s appeal against a trial court order rejecting his plea to make Mr. Chidambaram co-accused along with Mr. Raja.
Then Dr. Swamy applied for a review petition which was rejected in December 2012 by a Bench of Justices Singhvi and Radhakrishnan saying the order “does not suffer from any error apparent” which might warrant reconsideration.
Dr. Swamy then took recourse to a “Curative Petition” which is a procedure evolved by Supreme Court through judicial pronouncement which provide that an aggrieved person, even after final verdict of Supreme Court and after dismissal of review petition may request the court to reconsider its judgment by showing gross miscarriage of justice. The concept of curative petition and the proper analysis of the judgment were pronounced in the case of Rupa Ashok Hurra v. Ashok Hurra ((AIR 2002 SC 1771)).
This was Mr. Swamy’s last legal option against Mr. Chidambaram in the high-profile case which has seen unprecedented acrimony between the BJP and the Congress. Dismissing the petition, the court said, “We have gone through the curative petition and the relevant documents. In our opinion, no case is made out within the parameters indicated.”