The Supreme Court on Monday refused to order a CBI probe against Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi on his citizenship controversy.
Holding a PIL seeking CBI inquiry as “frivolous and baseless”, a bench of Chief Justice H L Dattu and Amitava Roy summarily dismissed the plea. In fact, senior advocates Kapil Sibal and Harin Raval, appearing for Rahul, did not have to utter a word to get the petition rejected.
The bench said it is for the Election Commission to take action if Rahul Gandhi had made wrong statements about his citizenship in his nomination paper. The bench also pointed out many infirmities in the PIL and said that there was no substantial evidence placed by the petitioner to substantiate his allegations.
“Who is to prove that he made incorrect statements? You cannot make allegations on the basis of some documents. We cannot start making a roving inquiry against anyone,” the bench said while dismissing the petition. It said the concept of PIL should not be misused to target any individual or organization and it should be used only in larger public interest.
Sensing the mood of the court, the petitioner, advocate M L Sharma, pleaded the court to allow him to withdraw the petition so that he could approach the appropriate forum on the issue. The bench, however, refused to allow him to withdraw the petition.
BJP leader Subramanian Swamy had recently alleged that the Congress vice-President has claimed himself to be a British national before the authorities in connection with incorporation of a firm in UK.
Rahul Gandhi had rejected the allegations and dared the Centre to order a probe against him.
Congress celebrated the dismissal of the petition, with its spokesperson R S Surjewala saying that the order was a rebuff to Swamy. The spokesperson said that the BJP leader had leveled the charge against Rahul based on the same set of papers accessed from the website of the Registrar of Companies of England that the apex court held to be inauthentic.
“Let it be put on record that the petition filed by M L Sharma contains exactly the same documents which have been used by Swamy. The court has vindicated what we have been saying for long,” said Surjewala, stressing that the court’s order had put a stop to the vilification campaign against Rahul over the citizenship issue.