Supreme Court posts Rafale reviews for hearing in open court

NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court will hear in open court pleas for the review and recall of its December 14 order dismissing a bunch of petitions seeking a probe into the Rafale fighter jet deal.

The same three-judge bench of Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi and Justices Sanjay Kishan Kaul and KM Joseph, which had dismissed the petitions, is considering the review pleas. The bench, while deciding to hold the hearings in open court, didn’t set any date for that on Tuesday.

Former ministers Arun Shourie and Yashwant Sinha, lawyer Prashant Bhushan and two others had moved the court for probing the deal to buy 36 aircraft from France’s Dassault Aviation. The court in its order had said there was no occasion to “doubt the decision-making process” of the government.


Shourie and others now want the top court to recall that order and also take perjury action against the government for allegedly making wrong assertions to the court over a Comptroller and Auditor General report which they said wasn’t finalised at the time. The government said the issues they raised were over mere grammatical errors in the order. It had also filed an application to correct those.

All the pleas will now be jointly heard in open court.

In their plea for the recall of the order, Shourie and Bhushan alleged that the government had deliberately misled the court by claiming that the CAG had given it an all-clear and the report had been placed before the Public Accounts Committee of Parliament.