SC orders probe into forgery of its order

Following dismissal of their plea by the Supreme Court, a forged certified copy of the SC order was sent to the Director of Sports and Youth Affairs with a plea that the students be allowed to appear in the exam as per an apex court "directive", sources said. The forgery was detected when the department received another copy of the SC order from its counsel, in due course.

The discrepancy was brought to the SC’s notice, leading to the initiation of the contempt process against Binit Kumar Singh, who had initiated the dispute in a representative capacity for the CPEd Vidyarthi Sangh, a group of affected students, sources added.

Meanwhile, the high-level probe, being conducted by Supreme Court Registrar (Judicial) B M Gupta, was necessitated after Binit Kumar disowned the very lawyers, who represented him in the Special Leave Petition (SLP). Kumar has recorded a statement with the apex court that he never hired their services and knew little about the details of the forgery.

An apex court bench last heard the contempt matter on May eight when it ordered the probe to ascertain the facts and pin down the culprit. The SC Registrar has since served notices, dated June 16, to all the parties concerned, including two Nagpur-based lawyers, Sriram Palshikar and V. R. Choudhari, and D. W. Gund, a staffer with the Paper and Books section at the Nagpur bench of the Bombay High Court, asking them to appear in person at his office on June 30 for recording their statements.

Sources at the HC here maintain that the probe bears serious ramifications for the two lawyers, one of whom hails from an influential family, and the court staffer, who, in particular, is suspected of having played a dubious role in the entire affair. Gund’s name surfaced in the statement before the Supreme Court by S. V. Deshpande, an advocate-on-record, who had filed the vakalatnama in the SLP matter.

When contacted, Deputy Registrar V. P. Rothe at the HC here, confirmed the matter but avoided going into the details of the same. Palshikar and Choudhari too confirmed having received the notices when called on by this reporter.

The entire matter dates back to academic session 1994-95 when the Lokmata Indira Gandhi College of Sports, run by the late Savitribai Shikshan Prasarak Mandal at Yavatmal, inducted a batch of over 1,200 students for the CPEd course, which was then recognised by the Department of Sports.

The course offerred job opportunity as Physical Trainers (PT) at schools and the batch comprised a majority of students hailing from states like UP, Punjab, Haryana, Bihar, Himachal Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh.

Sources said the college itself was recognised by the government when the batch was half-way through the course. In a subsequent development, the government adopted a policy of derecognising the course for different shortcomings afflicting such colleges, the prominent Hanuman Vyayam Prasarak Mandal (HVPM) of Amravati being a worthy exception to this.

Caught in a bind over the state policy and the students insisting for exams, the college management, headed by Secretary Megha Rude, preferred a writ petition in the HC bench here on the grounds that the state policy was discriminatory and the students be allowed to appear for the examination. The petition was dismissed after hearing, on March 21, 1997.

Later, the affected students formed the Vidyarthi Sangh and filed a fresh plea through advocate Choudhari. Binit Kumar, a native of Amethi in Uttar Pradesh, and another student, Charan Singh of Nidana in Haryana, were the petitioners in representative capacity. After hearing the matter, the HC dismissed this petition too on August 26, 1997. However, yet another plea was filed in the HC — this time through advocate Palshikar — which again met the same fate as the previous petitions.

Finally, Binit Kumar moved the apex court by filing a SLP for which the vakalatnama, according to Palshikar, was furnished by Deshpande. Advocate Santosh Akolkar, also from HC bench here, identified the petitioner by signing the solemn affirmation in the SLP.

The matter was argued on behalf of the petitioner by former HC judge and now a senior apex court lawyer, V. A. Mohta, and the SLP was dismissed by the then Supreme Court bench of Justices Sujata Manohar and G B Patnaik in August 1998.

In the days to follow, the State department found out that it had received two different copies of Supreme Court order, one of which was apparently a forged document.