New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Thursday said its inquiry panel headed by former SC judge A K Patnaik has said it could not rule out a larger conspiracy to frame former Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi in a sexual harassment case in April 2019.
Giving details of the Justice Patnaik committee's findings, a bench of Justices Sanjay Kishan Kaul, A S Bopanna and V Ramasubramanian said, "The report acknowledges that the existence of conspiracy cannot be ruled out." The bench said Justice Patnaik expressed inability to probe the larger conspiracy as he had limited investigation powers to access electronic records like chats and phone calls on WhatsApp, Telegram and other social media communication networks.
Justice Patnaik was appointed by the SC through a judicial order on April 25, 2019, as a one-member inquiry panel to probe the larger conspiracy issue. The inquiry report was submitted in a sealed cover to the SC in September 2019 and it was opened by the court for the first time on Thursday and conclusions made public. A separate three-judge in-house inquiry panel headed by Justice S A Bobde had on May 6, 2019, dismissed the sexual harassment complaint against Justice Gogoi.
The report of the inquiry committee, which had taken assistance from Intelligence Bureau, CBI and Delhi Police, confirmed Justice Gogoi's suspicion about a larger conspiracy. A July 5, 2019, report of the IB to the committee said there was strong reason to believe that some people, unhappy with the strong stance taken by Justice Gogoi in certain sensitive matters like finalisation of Assam NRC and tough administrative decisions to streamline the SC registry, could have hatched a conspiracy to embroil him in a controversy.
The Justice Patnaik-led inquiry panel said it could not establish whether certain decisions taken by the CJI on the judicial side had triggered the conspiracy as the terms of reference were restricted to examining the veracity of the claims and allegations made by advocate Utsav Singh Bains.