Rafale Case: Supreme Court Allows New Evidence To Be Taken On Record

The Supreme Court, in a unanimous judgment, today allowed new evidence to be taken into record for the hearing of a review petition in the Rafale case.

A three-judge bench led by Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi dismissed the preliminary objections by the central government concerning admission of the confidential documents concerning the purchase of 36 Rafale fighter jets.

The apex court is yet to announce a date for hearing the review petition.

The top court had on Dec. 14 rejected petitions to order a probe into India’s fighter jet deal with France.

“So far as the decision-making is concerned, we have studied the material and interacted with senior air force officers,” a three-judge bench of the top court, while delivering a unanimous verdict, had said. “There was no occasion to doubt the process.”

Subsequently review petitions were filed in the case seeking review of the judgment that upheld the inter-government aircraft purchase deal. The petitioners sought to include fresh documents which, according to them, revealed irregularities in the deal. Most of the documents that the petitioners relied on were the same ones with which media outlets such as The Hindu had published their stories.

The government, which was represented by Attorney General KK Venugopal, had claimed privilege over the documents and opposed the court taking notice of them. The attorney general had said that the documents pertained to issues of national security and hence shouldn’t be taken on record.

The petitioners argued that the claim of privilege applies to documents which aren’t in the public domain and in this case the documents had already been published by media outlets. National security won’t be impacted by taking on record the documents which have already been made public, the petitioners contended.