Books | The Dirt Trail

Ravi Nair and Paranjoy Guha Thakurta

On 6 September, the Supreme Court of India agreed to list a petition filed by advocate Manohar Lal Sharma against Modi and others, seeking a court order for an investigation into their involvement in pushing through the controversial Rafale aircraft purchase agreement and for the cancellation of the agreement altogether.

Sharma was known for his “PIL activism.” He had been in the news for the wrong reasons when he made misogynistic remarks in defence of the accused in the 2012 gang-rape and murder in New Delhi of a 22-year-old physiotherapy student (given the name of Nirbhaya by a prominent newspaper, The Times of India). It was alleged that Sharma had filed the petition in order to scuttle the possibility of an investigation to save face for the Modi government. A few months later, in December 2018, when Sharma filed another petition that the Supreme Court deemed “frivolous,” the apex court fined him Rs 50,000 and threatened to impose a five-year ban on him filing public interest litigation petitions. In recent years, Sharma has filed over 100 petitions in the Delhi High Court and the Supreme Court. Less than a year later, when Sharma rushed to file a petition against the government’s August 2019 decision to de-operationalise Article 370 of the Constitution, effectively revoking Jammu and Kashmir’s special status, Bhushan remarked on Twitter.

This fellow ML Sharma has been fined several times for filing bogus PILs. He challenged the Rafale contract & was happy with the dismissal of his petition. Didn’t file any review petition for reversing the judgement.

What follows is an extraordinary story of this petition relating to the Rafale deal that took place in the country’s top court.

Petitioner Sharma alleged that there was corruption in the Rafale contract and pleaded with the apex court that it orde