Prashant Bhushan’s ‘PIL centre’ draws CJI Thakur’s wrath
India today, 13th Jan, 2016
 Noted lawyer and activist Prashant Bhushan was in for a surprise on Tuesday when Chief Justice TS Thakur raised pointed questions on the working of his Centre for Public Interest Litigation (CPIL), the NGO which has successfully filed several petitions on a host of issues and got favourable orders.
The CJI went to the extent of expressing concern that rival commercial litigants of some business houses could be using the NGO, which has so far filed nearly 50 PILs, as an instrument to settle scores.
During the hearing of a fresh PIL filed by CPIL challenging the grant of 4G licences to Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Jio Infocom Ltd (RJIL), Thakur asked: "Why should we hear PILs filed by CPIL? You are a professional litigant. Can you become a "centre" for PIL? Can anyone walk into your office and tell you 'I want to file a PIL'?"
CPIL's biggest moment was when acting on its PIL, the court in February 2012 cancelled all 122 2G spectrum licenses allotted during the UPA regime following findings of irregularities and also ordered criminal prosecution of several top politicians including former minister A Raja and DMK MP Kanimozhi.
Bhushan replied that CPIL was an organisation formed by senior lawyers and had a committee, comprising senior advocates, who scrutinise every petition before it is filed in court. "There is a committee which comprises Fali Nariman, Anil Divan, Kamini Jaiswal, my father and myself. All petitions are scrutinised by us," replied Bhushan.
The CJI then said whenever a petition is filed by CPIL, the court "should have the confidence that the same is not at the instance of a party which is trying to settle to scores with someone else".
"Do we have that initial confidence that a litigation is not at the instance of a party trying to settle scores with some other party? Does the petition filed by CPIL go through such a process? We would like to go into the question whether petitions filed by CPIL go through such a process and it is a serious PIL."
"When a petition is filed by CPIL, the court usually considers it seriously while the same petition might be treated indifferently if filed by a party with commercial interests When you come to us, we take you seriously. But when a commercial competitor comes to us, we might not. This competitor knows this and might send a proxy to you with documents and information which you otherwise don't have access to. You have to establish a credible mechanism to justify that a particular case is fit to he agitated," said the CJI.
Bhushan replied that the CPIL had all these issues in mind and there was a committee precisely for this job. "Whenever a commercially-interested person comes to us, we look at the information given to him with great suspicion. It is only after the committee scrutinises the information and is satisfied that aside from the commercial interest of the informant, there is public interest involved that we decide whether to file a case or not."
When the CJI raised queries about the funding of CPIL, Bhushan replied that 'there is hardly any funding' and most of the work is pro bono.