Supreme Court Directs All High Courts To Respond To Suggestions Of Amicus On Expediting Trials In Cases Against MPs/MLAs

The Supreme Court on Tuesday sought the response of the High Courts to the suggestions made by amicus curiae Senior Advocate Vijay Hansaria for expediting the trail in the cases against sitting and former MPs/MLAs.

During the hearing, the bench comprising CJI DY Chandrachud and Justice PS Narasimha stated that the court will be able to deal with the matter of expediting trial of legislators in a systematic manner only once it had sufficient data pertaining to pending cases, workload of judges, undertrial legislators etc from each State or district. Accordingly, the bench directed all High Courts to respond to the 17th report filed by the amicus on November 17, 2022.

Hansaria submitted that though the Supreme Court had passed various orders from time to time to expedite trials, the desired effects have not been met. Thus, he provided the bench with certain suggestions which would help fulfil the prayer of the petitioner. 

Following suggestions were provided by Hansaria:

1. The courts dealing with cases pertaining to MP and MLA will exclusively try such cases, and not others.

2. The trials would be conducted on a date to day basis in terms of Section 309 of CrPC.

3. Necessary allocation of work would be made by the High Court or the Principal Sessions Judge of the said district.

Justice PS Narasimha expressed his reservations about the suggestions and stated that dealing with specific cases would virtually mean that the courts would not be taking any other cases because there were limited judges in the Indian judiciary. He added–

"Instead of having an omnibus submission like this, can we do this that we take a particular state or a particular district and then in that district we examine how many judges are there."

To this, Hansaria replied that the said exercise had already been carried out by the court and all the high courts had been asked to give action reports regarding the same. Despite the same, he stated that the number of cases against MP/MLAs  had grown from 4112 to 5112. He said–

"We have 4759 legislators in the country. Almost 300 to 400 are murder cases and they are life sentence cases."

CJI DY Chandrachud asked Hansaria to collect specific data and come back to the court. He said– 

"Suppose we issue this direction, the High Court will have to find the infrastructure and the judicial stage for creating special courts, earmarking all these trials to one judge and so forth." 

The CJI further stated that the directions sought in the petition were rather broad and omnibus because information pertaining to how many cases were pending before a particular court concerning MPs and MLAs and if there was a submission quota for work in a particular district- was required. He added–

"It may not be the same in all districts or all states for that matter. Why should we not focus state wise then, next time?"

Justice PS Narasimha echoed a similar sentiment and stated that since the solutions with respect to each state and circumstance would be different, the petitioner could take an egregious state where there were maximum number of cases pertaining to the matter and give the court data concerning the same.

The bench stated that once such data was collated, then they could ask the high courts and handle the issue in a systematic manner. The bench directed for the 17th report of the amicus to be circulated to all High Courts. The bench added that the High Courts shall respond to the report and place submissions on the suggestions made by the amicus curiae. 

Case Title: Ashwini Kumar Upadhyay v. UoI And Anr. WP(C) No. 699/2016 PIL

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