The much-anticipated meeting between the Chief Justice of India (CJI) Dipak Misra and the four senior-most judges has shifted to Thursday even as a retired Orissa High Court judge IM Quddusi, named an accused in the lucknow medical college admission scam, approached a Delhi Court against the CBI days after his phone conversations with other accused in the case got leaked on a news website.
It was the absence of the senior-most puisne judge at Supreme Court, Justice Jasti Chelameswar, that was the reason for postponing the crucial meet between the five top judges. Justice Chelameswar was reportedly unwell and a notice was put out outside his courtroom cancelling all Court proceedings for the day. Following his absence, the other three judges - Justice Ranjan Gogoi, Justice Madan B lokur and Justice Kurian Joseph - decided to shift the meeting to Thursday. The decision was communicated to the CJI as well.
According to sources, the four senior-most judges had met on Tuesday evening to discuss about the way forward following their meeting CJI on Tuesday morning. The four judges agreed to come to a consensus and the CJI too consented to heed to their demands of arbitrary listing of all politically sensitive cases to a specific bench. Other judges of the Apex Court, hurt by the current standoff between the judges of the Top Court, had offered to mediate for an early resolution of the crisis.
In a related development, Qudussi who is currently on bail following his arrest in an admission scam relating to a lucknow medical college, approached a Delhi court with a prayer demanding response from CBI as to how his private phone conversations were tapped and leaked. The conversations made its way to a news website which published the former judge's talks with a middleman and the owner of Prasad Education Trust, the medical college involved in the controversy.
It was the hearing on this case in the Supreme Court by a bench headed by CJI Dipak Misra which raised fingers on whether the case was “fixed”. The phone conversations indicated that the retired judge got an assurance from the middleman, an Odisha based businessman, to allegedly bribe the judges in the Top Court for a favourable order.