New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Thursday while cautioning the High Courts from ordering CBI probe mechanically, rejected the plea of Sujatha Ravi Kiran of Kochi seeking a CBI probe into the charges of wife swapping and sexual abuse against her husband, Ravi Kiran and others.
A Bench of Chief Justice T.S. Thakur and Justices R. Banumathi and Uday Lalit also dismissed her plea to transfer the pending criminal case from a Kochi court to a court in Delhi. The Bench, however, directed the Kerala government to constitute a special team of police officers headed by an officer not below the rank of Deputy Inspector General of Police to investigate the matter. The petitioner Sujatha in her complaint had made allegations of wife-swapping and also implicated few names.
The Bench said that before parting with the case, we deem it necessary to emphasise that despite wide powers conferred by Articles 32 and 226 of the Constitution, while passing any order, the Courts must bear in mind certain self-imposed limitations on the exercise of these constitutional powers.
The very plenitude of the power under the said Articles requires great caution in its exercise. Insofar as the question of issuing a direction to CBI to conduct investigation in a case is concerned, although no inflexible guidelines can be laid down to decide whether or not such power should be exercised but time and again it has been reiterated that such an order is not to be passed as a matter of routine or merely because a party has levelled some allegations.
