E-Paper
SC panel report to not impact judge’s impeachment process
If the impeachment process is initiated in the monsoon session, the entire process will need to be completed within the 31-day session itself
A report by a three-member committee set up by the Supreme Court to look into allegations against sitting high court judge, justice Yashwant Varma, will have no bearing on Parliament’s impeachment process as the House will rely on the notice of the MPs and its in-house report, top officials of the Lok Sabha said on Monday.
The government has said that it has spoken to opposition parties to bring a motion for the impeachment of justice Varma in the upcoming monsoon session of Parliament over allegations of a cash haul from his residence in Delhi in March.
If the impeachment process is initiated in the monsoon session, the entire process will need to be completed within the 31-day session itself.
On Monday, Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla said that “due process will be followed” if at least 100 Lok Sabha MPs sign a notice to impeach justice Varma.
Senior Lok Sabha officials said that following the notice of the MPs, the presiding officer of the House (in the case of the Lok Sabha, it will be Birla) will first verify the signatures — a process that involves the Speaker’s office verifying with individual MPs that the signature indeed belongs to him or her.
“After the signatures are verified and the motion is adopted, the House will form a panel comprising a Supreme Court judge, high court chief justice and an eminent jurist,” said a second official.
A second official pointed out that the entire process involving the passage of the motion in both Houses “has to be finished in the upcoming monsoon session. “Otherwise, the motion becomes infructuous. There is no provision to carry it over to the next session,” said a senior official.
For the removal of a sitting judge, the motion requires the signatures of 100 MPs in the Lok Sabha and 50 in the Rajya Sabha. For the motion to pass, it has to garner the support of a majority of the total membership of that House and by a majority of not less than two-thirds of the members of the House present and voting.
This means that a successful impeachment motion will need multi-party support.
Earlier this year, then Chief Justice of India Sanjiv Khanna initiated the process for the removal of justice Varma by writing to President Droupadi Murmu and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, stating that the allegations of recovery of cash at the judge’s residence was serious and warranted initiation of proceedings for his removal under the Constitution.
On May 5, a three-member in-house enquiry committee submitted its report to the CJI confirming that cash was indeed found at the residence of justice Varma, then a sitting Delhi high court judge. This cash was kept in a storeroom where a fire broke out March 14, following which fire service officials and police, engaged in dousing the flames, discovered half-burnt currency notes stacked in a sack. The police even recorded a video of the cash .
Then Calcutta high court judge Soumitra Sen was the first judge in independent India to be impeached in the Rajya Sabha. But he resigned before the Lok Sabha was scheduled to discuss his impeachment motion.
In 1993, Parliament witnessed the first impeachment motion against a sitting judge when the Lok Sabha debated on the proposal to impeach the then chief justice of the Punjab and Haryana high court, V Ramaswami. The motion failed as a requisite number of MPs didn’t vote.
