The Supreme Court on Monday junked a batch of 58 pleas challenging the government's 2016 decision to demonetise currency notes of Rs 1,000 and Rs 500 denominations. The apex court upheld the decision of the Central government to ban currencies.
SC ruled that the demonetisation decision does not suffer from any legal or constitutional flaws, it said that the petitions can be placed before an appropriate bench by the CJI for deciding isues lonked to the main issue relating to validity of demonetisation process.
"There was consultation between the centre and the RBI for a period of 6 months. we hold that there was a reasonable nexus to bring such a measure, and we hold that demonetisation was not hit by doctrine of proportionality," Justice Gavai said.
A five-judge Constitution bench headed by Justice S A Nazeer, who will retire on January 4, pronounced its verdict on the matte as the top court reopened after its winter break.
According to Monday's cause list of the top court, there were two separate judgements in the matter, which was pronounced by Justices B R Gavai and B V Nagarathna.
Besides Justices Nazeer, Gavai and Nagarathna, the other members of the five-judge bench are Justices A S Bopanna and V Ramasubramanian.
The top court had, on December 7, directed the Centre and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to put on record the relevant records relating to the government's 2016 decision and reserved its verdict.
It heard the arguments of Attorney General R Venkataramani, the RBI's counsel and the petitioners' lawyers, including senior advocates P Chidambaram and Shyam Divan.
Calling the scrapping of the Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 currency notes deeply flawed, Chidambaram had argued that the government cannot on its own initiate any proposal relating to legal tender, which can only be done on the recommendation of the RBI's central board.
Resisting the apex court's attempt to revisit the 2016 demonetisation exercise, the government had said the court cannot decide a matter when no tangible relief can be granted by way of "putting the clock back" and "unscrambling a scrambled egg".
The RBI had earlier admitted in its submissions that there were "temporary hardships" and that those too are an integral part of the nation-building process, but there was a mechanism by which the problems that arose were solved.
In an affidavit, the Centre told the top court recently that the demonetisation exercise was a "well-considered" decision and part of a larger strategy to combat the menace of fake money, terror financing, black money and tax evasion.
The Supreme Court has heard a batch of 58 petitions challenging the demonetisation exercise announced by the Centre on November 8, 2016.
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