It’s going to be business as usual for Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra in the week that starts April 23, according to the list released by the Supreme Court’s registry on Saturday.
On Friday, the Congress and six other parties submitted notice of a motion for the removal of the CJI to chairman of the Rajya Sabha M Venkaiah Naidu. This is the first such notice ever presented against a CJI. The notice was signed by 71 MPs, although seven of them have retired from he upper house since signing it. Naidu is yet to take a call on admitting the motion.
Government officials said on Saturday that the Congress had flouted Rajya Sabha rules by going public with the notice of a motion that was yet to be admitted in the house.
The CJI hasn’t publicly responded to the notice.
Interestingly, while the list is drawn by the registry, the cases are allocated to particular judges and benches by the CJI exercising his powers as the “master of the roster”.
In the week ahead, the CJI will be hearing some important cases.
On Tuesday, April 24, a five-judge bench led by Misra will continue hearing the hotly contested Aadhaar case in which over 35 petitions have challenged the government’s contentious project.
Besides Aadhaar, the CJI is also hearing a petition seeking a transfer of the case of gangrape and murder of an eight-year-old girl in Jammu and Kashmir’s Kathua to Chandigarh.
In his petition, the father of the child victim has expressed fears of not getting a free and fair trial in Kathua.
Earlier this month, the Kathua Bar Association tried to prevent the police from filing a chargesheet in the case.
The CJI is also part of a three-judge bench that resume hearing in the contentious Ram Janma Bhoomi dispute. This bench is expected to decide whether the case has to be referred to a larger bench or not.
As per the roster, a five-member bench led by the Misra is also to hear the controversial issue of the ban on the entry of women between 10 and 50 years of age in Kerala’s Sabarimala temple.
The same five-judge bench will also hear a legal question on whether a Parsi woman would lose her religious identity if she marries a man from a different religion.
The CJI is also set to hear, as part of a three-judge bench, a petition that seeks reading down of section 377 of the Indian Penal code that criminalises same-sex relations .
Source: HindustanTimes