Sunanda Pushkar Case: Supreme Court has questioned the maintainability of Subramanian Swamy's plea (File)
The Supreme Court today asked BJP leader Subramanian Swamy to satisfy it on the aspect of maintainability of his plea seeking an SIT probe into the Sunanda Pushkar case. Ms Pushkar was found dead under mysterious circumstances in a suite of a five-star hotel in Delhi on the night of January 17, 2014.
Mr Swamy has moved the Supreme Court after the Delhi High Court had in October last year dismissed his plea seeking a probe by a court-monitored Special Investigation Team (SIT) into Ms Pushkar's death.
During the hearing today, a bench comprising Justices Arun Mishra and Amitava Roy told Mr Swamy that he has to first satisfy the court on whether his plea was maintainable.
"Before going into merits, we need to be satisfied on maintainability," the bench told Mr Swamy who said that it is a matter of public interest.
He claimed that it took nearly one year for the Delhi Police to lodge an FIR in the case and the post-mortem report said that Pushkar had died an unnatural death. The bench, however, asked him to argue on the issue of maintainability and and posted the matter for hearing after three weeks.
The Delhi High Court had on October 26, last year, rejected Mr Swamy's plea for a court-monitored SIT probe into Ms Pushkar's death and termed his PIL as a "textbook example of a political interest litigation".
Mr Swamy, in his plea before the high court, had alleged that the police had "botched up" the investigation and accused Mr Tharoor of "interfering" in the investigation now and even earlier when he was a minister in the UPA regime.
When the high court questioned the source based on which he had made the allegations, the BJP leader and his lawyer, who is a co-petitioner, had said that they would file affidavits to reply to the court's query.
However, the bench had rejected their offer, saying it appeared that they had concealed information pertinent to the case, which they ought to have disclosed when they had filed the petition.
The high court had also said that Mr Swamy ought to have mentioned his political affiliation as well as that of Mr Tharoor in his petition as these facts were important to the adjudication of the case.