Saurabh Malik
Tribune News Service
Chandigarh, July 2

Just about a month after the Punjab and Haryana High Court concluded the process of designating senior advocates by coming out with a list of 19, the matter has reached the Supreme Court with the filing of a plea before it .

Information suggests three advocates Amar Vivek Aggarwal, Krishan Kumar Gupta and Harbhajan Singh Dhandi have filed the plea against the Punjab and Haryana High Court, its full court, the permanent committee for senior designation and the advocates designates as seniors.

Plea claims violations by high court

• The plea, among other things, states the HC violated the Supreme Court's mandatory directions. It was also against the rules framed by the HC pursuant to the Indira Jaising case
• The plea adds the entire result of 112 candidates was not placed before the full court for its approval. As such, the “full court wrongly and illegally voted thereon”
• Directions have been sought to produce the entire records, quash the notification dated May 28 in this regard and to set aside the list of senior designations

The High Court had conducted the process of designating seniors after a gap of seven years. In all, just about 17 per cent of the total applicants succeeded in getting the senior tag.

No less than 113 advocates had initially applied, but one of the candidates died during the process. The remaining 112 applications were scanned by the permanent committee for designation as senior advocates.

The committee, comprising Chief Justice Ravi Shanker Jha, Justice Jaswant Singh, Justice Rajan Gupta, Punjab Advocate-General Atul Nanda, Haryana Advocate-General BR Mahajan and Additional Solicitor-General Satya Pal Jain, also interacted with the candidates. It eventually came out with a list of 27 candidates, which was placed before the full court for approval.

The list failed to find the full court’s ready approval. The judges not only voted upon the names of the 27 shortlisted candidates, but also ‘ticked’ against the names of left-out applicants they considered deserving. There was, however, no interaction with candidates mentioned in the left-out list.

Eventually, advocate Baljit Kaur Mann’s name was included from the left-out candidates’ list after a majority of the judges favoured her designation as a senior. Nine other shortlisted applicants were excluded.