Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla on Tuesday set up a committee to investigate allegations against High Court judge Yashwant Varma in the unaccounted cash row.
The three-member inquiry panel will comprise Supreme Court judge Arvind Kumar, Chief Justice of the Madras High Court Maninder Mohan Srivastava and BV Acharya, a senior advocate in the Karnataka High Court.
The panel will submit its report “as early as possible”, Birla told the Lower House of Parliament.
The proposal to impeach Varma will remain pending till the committee submits its report.
To impeach a judge in Parliament, a removal motion is required to be signed by 100 Lok Sabha MPs or 50 Rajya Sabha MPs. Once the motion is admitted, a three-member judicial committee investigates the matter.
The Parliament votes on the impeachment if the committee finds misconduct. If the motion gets two-thirds of the votes, the president is advised to remove the judge.
On July 25, Union Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kiren Rijiju said that the decision to impeach Varma was unanimous and that 152 MPs from the ruling coalition and the Opposition parties had signed the motion.
There is consensus that the removal of Varma should be a joint effort, he had said, adding that the Lok Sabha will take up the proceedings before they move to the Rajya Sabha in line with the Judges Inquiry Act.
Unaccounted cash was allegedly recovered at Varma’s official residence in Delhi when emergency services responded to a fire there on March 14. He was a judge at the Delhi High Court at that time. The judge said that he was in Bhopal when the cash was discovered and claimed that it did not belong to him or his family.
Amid the row, he was transferred to the Allahabad High Court.
On March 22, the Supreme Court released a report, including a video and three photographs, showing bundles of notes that were allegedly recovered from the judge’s home.
The redacted report showed that Delhi High Court Chief Justice Devendra Kumar Upadhyaya had written to Varma on March 21, asking him to “account for the presence of money/cash” in a room located in his bungalow.
After Varma declined to voluntarily retire or resign, Sanjiv Khanna, the chief justice of India at the time, sent the final in-house inquiry committee report on the incident to the president and the prime minister.
The committee in its report, dated May 3, had concluded that there was “sufficient substance” in the charges against Varma. The report held that the judge’s misconduct was “serious enough to call for initiation of proceedings for removal”.
However, the report did not address questions about how the fire started, how much money was found and where the cash came from.
On July 18, Varma moved the Supreme Court against the in-house panel’s findings, arguing that it creates a “parallel, extra-constitutional mechanism” and undermines the procedure laid out in law, which vests the power to remove High Court judges in Parliament.
Varma also challenged the recommendation made by Khanna to the president and the prime minister to initiate impeachment proceedings against him.
In his petition, Varma argued that the in-house inquiry committee had reached conclusions without giving him a fair opportunity to respond.
However, the Supreme Court on August 7 dismissed Varma’s plea, saying that the inquiry had legal sanction and did not violate his fundamental rights.
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