Karnataka Deputy CM D K Shivakumar withdraws HC plea against graft probe sanction

“As the appellant himself has filed the memo seeking withdrawal of the petition and therefore the appeal is disposed of as withdrawn,” the high court division bench of Chief Justice P B Varale and Justice Krishna Dixit ruled.

The bench rejected the arguments made by the CBI and an intervening applicant, BJP MLA Basanagouda Patil Yatnal, that the withdrawal of consent was illegal and contrary to a 1994 Supreme Court order. The division bench rejected the arguments on the grounds that the November 23 Congress government decision had not been challenged by itself.

The counsel for the CBI and Yatnal relied on a Supreme Court judgment in the Khazi Lhendup Dorji vs CBI case from 1994 where the apex court ruled that the revocation of consent for a CBI probe would not affect cases where investigations are already underway.

“The state cabinet passed the order withdrawing the case from Respondent No 3 (CBI), it clearly indicates the entire state cabinet is used to facilitate such illegal and unconstitutional steps to favor the appellant (Shivakumar),” the counsel for Yatnal argued.

“Though the learned counsel vehemently submitted that the state government ought not to have withdrawn the consent and such acts are not acceptable or sustainable and this decision can be treated as non-est decision, in our opinion we are unable to assess these submissions for the simple reason that until now there is no challenge to the subsequent order of the government,” the Karnataka high court said Wednesday.

“Even in judgment of Khazi Dorji vs CBI it emerged that the government order withdrawing sanction was subjected to challenge in a proceeding before the court,” the high court said.

“At the cost of repetition we state that right now there is no such challenge raised before this court and as such this court cannot consider the submissions of the learned counsel for CBI as well as the learned counsel for the applicant,” the division bench said.

Senior advocate Kapil Sibal, who appeared on behalf of the Karnataka government, told the high court that the process of inception of the CBI case against Shivakumar was itself not valid since the sanction was sought without an FIR registered.

The November 23 Karnataka cabinet decision is seen by the BJP as being an effort to circumvent an April 20, 2023 decision of a single judge of the high court not to quash the sanction given in 2019 for the CBI investigation against Shivakumar.

The CBI had filed an FIR in October 2020 – after obtaining the sanction from the B S Yediyurappa-led BJP government on September 25, 2019 – against Shivakumar on charges of corruption, based on the findings of income-tax department searches carried out in August 2017 at around 70 premises linked to the Congress leader. The CBI has alleged that Shivakumar amassed Rs 74.93 crore of wealth disproportionate to known sources of income from April 2013 to April 2018, when he was the energy minister in the Congress-led Karnataka government.