Hyderabad: In a shot in the arm for Chief Minister A. Revanth Reddy-led Congress government, the Supreme Court on Monday set aside a Telangana High Court division bench order that had declared an 85-acre Raidurg land parcel worth about Rs 8,000 crore as private.
The apex court order blocked the attempts of private parties, including film producer Burugupalli Sivarama Krishna and a mega infrastructure company, to take over the government land.
The Supreme Court bench comprising Justice Sanjiv Khanna and Justice Dipankar Datta found fault with the High Court division bench for “ostensibly creating necessary grounds of review” and said the latter “unfortunately missed the wood for the trees.”
Maintaining that the High Court had exceeded both its review and contempt jurisdiction, the apex court said, “The exercise of review jurisdiction is not an inherent power given to the court; the power to review has to be specifically conferred by law.”
Further, the apex court said, “The HC bench, in our opinion, has fundamentally confused both its remit and the subject matter of the review; whilst passing the impugned order, it has merged the two proceedings (the civil suit and the writ petition) into one to ostensibly create necessary grounds of review.”
The land in Survey No. 46 had been recorded as government land since 1954, confirmed by the joint collector in 1968 and upheld by the Board of Revenue in 1971. After several rounds of litigation, the matter reached the apex court. Interestingly, efforts were made to dilute the state’s legal fight during the previous Bharata Rashtra Samithi regime by changing senior counsel appearing for the government.
Official sources told this correspondent that when the case came up for final hearing in May this year, Revanth Reddy directed the revenue officials to not take any chances and continue with senior counsel S. Vaidyanathan who had earlier vehemently argued in favour of the state government in the Telangana High Court.
“The BRS government initially allowed filing of the special leave petition and issued written instructions to engage Vaidyanathan. But, in August last year, two powerful officials who ruled the roost in land matters made an effort to avoid Vaidyanathan,” sources said adding that the state’s legal team in the Supreme Court and then revenue divisional officer K. Chandrakala refused to entertain their oral instructions and insisted on written orders to replace Vaidyanathan.
