SC questions urgency in action against Alok Verma
NEWDELHI: The Supreme Court on Thursday asked the Centre to explain its midnight action against CBI chief Alok Verma, underlining that the government appeared to have tolerated the feud between Alok Verma and his deputy that had been going on for months.
“This situation that prompted the Central Vigilance Commission to take the action did not happen overnight... It is not that you were forced to take decision immediately,” Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi observed.
The internecine fight between the two officers, Alok Verma and the CBI special director Rakesh Asthana, had roiled the agency and forced the government to divest both of their powers on October 23.
Alok Verma, who had challenged his removal, had contended that the action against him amounted to a transfer, which could not be done without the approval of the Prime Minister-led high-powered panel that is empowered to appoint or transfer the CBI director, who gets a fixed tenure of two years. The leader of the largest party in Opposition and the CJI are the other members of this committee.
The Supreme Court had Wednesday heard the Centre argue that sending Alok Verma and his deputy on leave did not amount to a transfer. Attorney general KC Venugopal had also argued that it was compelled to intervene since the two officers, Verma and Asthana, were fighting like cats.
“This seriously affected government and it had to act to put an end to this”, the Centre’s top law officer KC Venugopal had pleaded in court.
He also argued that the trust of people in the agency was being reduced due to the allegations against the director. When the court resumed the hearing Thursday, the judges had some questions for the government.
“If you have two courses of action — acceptable and more acceptable – you must take the more acceptable course,” Chief Justice Gogoi said. He stressed that a transfer should not be understood in a very literal sense.
“What is the difficulty in convening the selection committee?
If you want to do something like divesting powers, it is better to consult the screening committee,” he said. Tushar Mehta, the government’s second most-senior law officer, said the top officers of CBI, “instead of investigating cases, were investigating cases against each other”. Mehta, explaining the urgency, said the CVC had “come to the conclusion that an extraordinary situation had arisen and that extraordinary situations sometimes need extraordinary remedies”.