Supreme Court Involvement
An application was made to the Supreme Court on 2 April requesting that it ordered a Special Investigation Team to probe the affair. The applicants were a group calling themselves the India Rejuvenation Initiative and they argued that the investigatory process had stalled since the report of the parliamentary committee. The hearing was adjourned to due a procedural irregularity in the application, and when this was resolved on 2 May the Court issued notices to the Delhi police and government that required them to provide information regarding the current status of the investigation. The petitioners said that
The cash-for-vote incident showed the desperate depths to which certain political functionaries and parties stooped to ensure victory on the floor of the House, and these exposures represent both a gross moral degeneration and crass political opportunism of the government and had degraded and disgraced our sacrosanct traditions of parliamentary democracy,On 7 July the Court voiced its frustration with the continued absence of the requested status reports and set a filing deadline of 15 July. The police had requested a further two months to fulfil the request. Upon being presented with the status report, the Court criticised the lethargy of the police investigation, complaining that little had been done and that which had been done was poorly documented, inconsistent and in places factually incorrect.
The court was similarly disparaging of a second report which followed on from a burst of activity by the police. On 5 August 2011, Justice Loda said
What are you doing regarding these inferences? It is distressing that middlemen of the cheapest kind tried to manipulate Parliament proceedings. To some extent, they have succeeded. You must find out what is the source of the money. You failed to achieve anything substantial in the case for two years and got activated only after the apex court orders.Read more about this topic: Cash-for-votes Scandal
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