SC collegium to drop Dinakaran recommendation

The Supreme Court collegium has decided to drop its recommendation for elevating Karnataka Chief Justice P D Dinakaran, facing charges of land grabbing, to the apex court, bringing to end months of controversy over the move. A decision has been taken, highly placed sources said.

The collegium led by Chief Justice K G Balakrishnan and including Justice S H Kapadia, Tarun Chatterjee, Altamas Kabir and R V Raveendran, met on Thursday evening and decided to take back the recommendation for his elevation. Earlier, the law ministry had rejected the August 27 recommendation of the collegium and asked it to reconsider the decision.

Rajya Sabha Chairman Hamid Ansari had on Thursday admitted a notice of the motion by Members of Parliament to start impeachment proceedings against Dinakaran over land-grabbing allegations.

The chairman is expected to constitute a three-member committee comprising a Supreme Court judge, a high court chief justice and a jurist to examine the notice and give its views before the impeachment process is carried forward.

Dinakaran, who has kept away from judicial work, has ruled out his resignation and termed as 'unfortunate' the impeachment motion tabled against him in Rajya Sabha.

Justice Dinakaran has said that allegations of land grabbing against him were 'baseless and incorrect' and claimed he can prove that his family was not holding any land beyond the limit.

On the impeachment motion moved against him in Rajya Sabha, he said it was not an end by itself and nothing could be concluded on that.

"I can only say it is an unfortunate situation. Unfortunate not from my point of view, unfortunate for not taking the entire reality and entire facts available on record into consideration," he had said.

Claiming that the allegations against him are "without any substance or without any basis", Dinakaran said his income tax returns will reveal the fact that these lands were owned by him even before his elevation as a judge in December 1996.