NEW DELHI: At a time when poor litigants have to wait in line for years to get their plea heard, Supreme Court Friday disapproved the practice of influential people indulging in “luxury litigation”, resulting in hearing of genuine cases getting delayed. It imposed a cost of Rs 5 lakh each on warring litigants for not approaching the court with “clean hands”.A bench of Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta rejected the plea of actress Rehana Khan and her lawyer Rizwan Siddique who have been fighting legal battles for past 11 years before different forums, including Bar Council of India, Bombay HC and SC.“Each of these parties has come to us complaining of a wrong, and each has been the author of a good part of it. Between them, they have occupied the time of the Bar Council, an HC and this court for 11 years. That time belonged to other litigants, waiting for relief they genuinely needed. We record our strong disapproval of the conduct of both. In view of the conduct of each party, we find it fit to impose costs,” the bench said.The bench noted that the two litigants approached the court in the confident expectation of vindication. “Every fact of consequence has had to be prised out of a record in which suppression, embellishment and afterthought are the common currency of both sides. The machinery of justice is not a facility placed at the disposal of parties to settle scores, to salvage reputations they have themselves imperilled, or to extract advantage from a controversy of their own making.
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We say at the outset, and give our reasons in what follows, that neither the appellant nor the respondent leaves this court with credit,” it said.“Record in these matters makes for compelling reading. Litigation of this kind holds a certain fascination, and we do not pretend otherwise. But a court is not an auditorium, and the drama of a case is no measure of its merit. Stripped of its theatre, what these proceedings disclose is a controversy which two litigants have between them manufactured, prolonged and brought to the highest court in the country, each in the hope that we would be sufficiently diverted by the spectacle to overlook their own part in creating it. We have not been,” it said.