Battleground shifts to Delhi

Sources said that the advocates also distributed copies of the memorandum to members of the SC Bar Association along with media reports regarding the alleged involvement of judges to create a ‘‘consensus against judicial corruption’’.

The sources revealed that the lawyers, who had earlier sought intervention of President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam in the matter, urged their counterparts in the Supreme Court and the Delhi High Court to extend their support to root out the alleged corruption in the entire judicial set-up.

They also attempted to impress upon their Delhi counterparts that ‘‘judicial corruption is not an internal matter of the judicial family’’ and it was not possible for anyone to ‘‘roll back the tide of history in the PPSC scam’’. They also made known their concern at the time the Chief Justice was taking to act on Justice Saharya’s report.

On its part, the Committee on Judicial Accountability, which had met on October 10 to consider the issue, also wrote to Justice Kirpal, asking him to act on the report.

The committee, in the letter, has stated that the judges should be disallowed from discharging judicial functions. Further, steps must be taken to secure their resignation, failing which they should be impeached.

‘‘The report that three judges of the High Court who are found to have been involved in some manner in the PPSC scam, are continuing to discharge judicial functions, is making a mockery of the in-house disciplinary procedure,’’ it said.

The letter said that it was the duty of the Chief Justice to make a recommendation to the government and to the President to initiate steps for impeachment of the judges, if the in-house mechanism fails to work.

‘‘We are certain that any such a recommendation cannot be ignored by the government and will indeed be taken up by sufficient number of MPs, so that the Constitution can take its course,’’ the accountability committee said in the letter.

Saharya, who had been asked by Justice Kirpal to inquire discreetly into the charges against the judges, had in his report concluded that ‘‘a vital part of investigations had been misdirected away from the involvement of judges’’ and stopped assigning all administrative and judicial work to the trio from June 28.

But on August 27, he restored all work to the trio — Justice Amarbir Singh, Justice M.L Singhal and Justice Mehtab Singh Gill — saying any ‘‘further course of action was outside his ambit’’, putting the onus of taking any further action against the judges on Justice Kirpal.