Chandigarh, September 5: The Punjab and Haryana High Court has ruled that the Justice Mehtab Singh Gill (retd) Commission has no competence to adjudicate on reinvestigation, and that too by an independent agency. The Commission, set up last year by the Congress government, has been probing false cases registered during the 10-year SAD-BJP rule.
Holding that the Commission exceeded its jurisdiction while passing an order in the case of retired IAS officer Mandeep Singh, the High Court also ruled that it did not deserve to be accepted at any cost by the state government.
Mandeep Singh had moved the High Court seeking compliance of directions issued by the Commission on August 2 last year. The Bench of Justice Rakesh Kumar Jain was told that an FIR was registered in August 2015 by the Superintendent of Police, Vigilance Bureau, Mohali, under the Prevention of Corruption Act and the Indian Penal Code. He was arrested in February 2017 and released on regular bail in June last year.
The Bench was also told that the petitioner made a representation to the Commission to probe his allegedly false implication, following which the panel recommend reinvestigation or further investigation by an independent agency.
“This can be done only after taking permission from the trial court where the challan has been presented,” it was said.
Taking up the matter, Justice Jain referred to a Constitutional Bench judgment of the Supreme Court in the case of “Dr Subramanian Swamy versus Arun Shourie” to say that a Commission was a fact-finding body for enabling the appropriate government to decide the course of action to be followed. It was not required to adjudicate on the rights of the parties and had no adjudicatory functions. It was further held that the government was not bound to accept its recommendations or act on its findings.
“The Commission, at the most, could have recommended to the government, on the basis of its findings, as to how the inquiry has not been fairly conducted, but had no competence to adjudicate upon the issue of reinvestigation/further investigation and that too by an independent agency or by SIT but not by the Vigilance Bureau,” Justice Jain added.
Before parting with the order, Justice Jain asserted that the court, after going through the record, was of the considered opinion that the Commission exceeded its jurisdiction while passing the impugned order, which did not deserve to be accepted at any cost by the state government. “The prayer made by the petitioner for the issuance of a direction to the respondents to accept the recommendations of the Commission is not made out,” Justice Jain concluded.
Source Tribune India
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