Top cop appointment: HC plea identical to ours in SC, filed to bypass genuine PIL: Bhushan

New Delhi: Advocate Prashant Bhushan on Tuesday told a bench of the Delhi High Court, heading by Chief Justice DN Patel, that the petition before it challenging the appointment of Rakesh Asthana as the Delhi Police Commissioner, was identical to his own PIL pending in the Supreme Court even as the Additional Solicitor General remarked that this was a case of a competitive PIL.

After the 1984-batch IPS officer from the Gujarat cadre was appointed as the chief of police here, four days before his scheduled superannuation, several petitions were filed against the appointment — one being Bhushan's PIL, another being a contempt plea against the PM and the Home Minister filed by advocate ML Sharma.

However, the present petition before the high court was also filed by one Sadre Alam, due to which the Supreme Court while hearing Bhushan's plea earlier, directed the Delhi HC to first decide the matter before it — but allowed him to file an intervention plea there.

Appearing for an NGO, Bhushan argued that the petition before the high court was a copy-paste of CPIL's plea before the Supreme Court: "We have filed an intervention on behalf of CPIL. Something extraordinary has happened in the matter. The petition is a total copy-paste. Full stop, comma, exclamation mark. The court may list it tomorrow or whenever. See the kind of abuse of process of law that is done."

We are keeping the matter for tomorrow. Intervention application (by the NGO) will be listed tomorrow along with the writ petition, said the bench of Chief Justice DN Patel and Justice Jyoti Singh.

Bhushan informed the court that the NGO's challenge to Asthana's appointment was adjourned by the Supreme Court on the last occasion and that he does not intend to "file another petition here".

In the intervention application, the NGO has contended that filing an identical writ petition without mentioning the pendency of the issue before the apex court seems to have been filed to defeat public interest by scuttling the genuine, bona fide and well-researched and deliberated PIL (pending before SC).

Alam stated that his petition was an outcome of his hard work. Additional Solicitor General Chetan Sharma said that the present instance was a case of competitive PIL.