Guwahati HC verdict on CBI stayed

Top court acts on govt petition

new delhi — The Supreme Court on Saturday stayed a Guwahati High Court order holding the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) unconstitutional after quashing the April 1963 home ministry resolution setting up the agency under the Delhi Special Police Establishment Act, 1946.

An apex court bench of Chief Justice P. Sathasivam and Justice Ranjana Prakash Desai stayed the high court order after a 19-minutelong hearing at the former’s residence on Saturday evening.

The order came after AttorneyGeneral G.E. Vahanvati mentioned the petition by the ministry of personnel and training, the CBI’s administrative ministry.

The government on Saturday morning filed a petition challenging the high court order and seeking an ex-parte stay.

While staying the high court order, the apex court issued notice to Narendra Kumar on whose petition the high court had pronounced its verdict. The notice has also gone to the home ministry and the CBI.

The next hearing is scheduled for December 6.

The petition by the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) said that though it was not a party before the Guwahati High Court, it was “moving the present Special Leave Petition against the impugned judgment due to the large scale ramifications and adverse impact on thousands of criminal cases pending throughout India”.

The DoPT is the coordinating agency of the Central Government in personnel matters.

While seeking the ex-parte stay of the High Court verdict as an interim relief, the petition said that it (the court order) “directly impacts about 9,000 trials currently underway and about 1,000 investigations which are being investigated by the CBI”.

The petition said the high court judgment was already being seized “upon by various accused persons in various proceedings in the country to seek a stay of further proceedings against them” and “if the impugned order is not stayed (it would) frustrate the law machinery and may result in multiplicity of proceedings”.

The government said the Guwahati High Court judgment has “serious ramifications on the functioning of the CBI as it has quashed a 50-year-old Resolution which had stood the test of time”.

It further said the investigating agency has been “functioning effectively and has a staff of about 6,000 people, all of whom are engaged in the investigation and prosecution of various cases”.

The petition by the DoPT said it was “thus likely to have serious and severe consequences and it is absolutely necessary in the interests of justice and convenience that immediate ad-interim orders be granted staying the said judgment and operation thereof”.

The high court in its November 6 verdict had said the CBI was neither an organ nor a part of the Delhi Special Police Establishment Act. “... while we decline to hold and declare that the DSPE Act, 1946, is not a valid piece of legislation, we do hold that the CBI is neither an organ nor a part of the DSPE Act... and the CBI cannot be treated as a ‘police force’ constituted under the DSPE Act, 1946.”

Having held that the CBI was not a police force constituted under the DSPE Act, the court quashed the April 1, 1963 resolution of the home ministry for constituting the investigating agency. “We hereby also set aside and quash the impugned Resolution, dated 01.04.1963, whereby CBI has been constituted,” the high court ruling said.

The petition has erred the high court for holding that “the Resolution dated 01.04.1963 does not mention the source of power or the DSPE Act, the resolution is legally infirm” and “that the CBI is not an organ of the DSPE”.

Addressing the question of law, the petition in a poser said whether the Guwahati High Court “failed to consider that even if a wrong provision is mentioned or the source is not referred to as long as there exists a valid source of power the wrong mention or not mentioning of the provision does not affect the validity of the order”. —