Going against its own judgement

The problem arose when the Appropriate Authority rejected the 37-I statutoryagreements filed by the buyers and the builders on the ground that 15 dayshad to be calculated from the date of the booking of the flats and not fromthe date of the subsequent private agreement or the statutory agreementsigned by both the parties. The rejection letters came within a month of thefiling of the statutory 37-I agreement. After losing in the Delhi HighCourt, DLF and others appealed to the Supreme Court.

The apex court had three options as to the point from which 15 days wouldrun: the date of booking, the date of private agreement or the date of thestatutory 37-I agreement. The appropriate authority had held that all themain terms between the buyer and the builder had been decided on the date ofthe booking of the flats by DLF and Ansals. Hence 15 days had to run fromthat date. Justice Wadhwa who wrote the judgement held that 15 days had torun from the date the statutory 37-I agreement was signed between theparties. Further, this 15-day period was not mandatory but only directory.

But, after this, instead of sending the matter back to the AppropriateAuthority, as had been done by the Delhi High Court, the Supreme Courtdeclared that the Authority must issue no objection certificates to thebuyers and the builders. This was so since the statutory 37-I statements hadbeen held to be valid and more than three months had passed between theirfiling in 1997 and the decision now in 2000. The Income Tax law requiresthat the Appropriate Authority has to issue a `no objection certificate’ ifit does not decide on the issue of the understatement of the value of theflats within three months of the receipt of the Form 37-I statement.

The judgement nowhere explains how a decision in favour of a party on thelegal issue of an application being time-barred becomes automatically adecision on whether substantial black money has been used in the transactionor not. The interpretation rule that a meaning must be given to the law tocurb the mischief, in this case black money, has not even been referred to.

As an institution especially empowered by the Constitution to do “completejustice”, can the apex court enable the bypassing of a law meant to curbblack money which, according to its own judgments, is inextricably linked tocorruption and a parallel government?

The apex court today has two stream of judgements. One in which it acts asthe moral guardian of national governance, as in the M.P. Trivedi or theVohra committee report and the hawala cases. The others are those where ithas simply abandoned this moral role as in the R.K. Garg vs Union of Indiaor the Black Money Ordinance, the tax samadhan and voluntary disclosurejudgments. With the DLF judgement, the scale seems to be tipping in favourof the second kind. Its euphemistic brand name is the realistic or pragmaticschool of judiciary.