NEW DELHI: In a shot in the arm for the opposition just ahead of the Lok Sabha elections, the Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected the Centre’s objections to the court scrutinising leaked Rafale documents and decided to hear petitions seeking review of its clean chit to the fighter deal.The court’s decision, four months after it upheld the NDA government’s deal to procure 36 fighter jets from France after scrutinising the decision-making process and pricing, comes as a boost to Congress as the petitioners had claimed substantial wrongdoing in the Rs 59,000-crore contract.A bench of Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi and Justices Sanjay Kishan Kaul and K M Joseph rejected attorney general K K Venugopal’s preliminary objections to the court entertaining a joint review petition by advocate Prashant Bhushan and former BJP leaders Arun Shourie and Yashwant Sinha , who had annexed ‘secret’ documents relating to the Rafale deal after they were published by ‘ The Hindu ’ newspaper.“We deem it proper to dismiss preliminary objections raised by the Union of India questioning maintainability of review petitions and we hold and affirm that the review petitions will have to be adjudicated on their own merit by taking into account relevance of the contents of the three documents, admissibility of which, in the judicial decision-making process, has been sought to be questioned by the Centre,” CJI Gogoi and Justice Kaul said.The Centre had argued that since the documents were unauthorised photocopies, they could not be taken into consideration, and officials responsible for their leak would face action. The government had previously maintained that the documents didn’t reflect the complete picture of how the government went about the purchase of the French fighter jets, and pertained to only a part of the process. It also said the issues raised in the documents were dealt with satisfactorily before the proposal to acquire Rafale jets was sent to the Cabinet Committee on Security.Justice Joseph agreed with CJI Gogoi’s 18-page judgment but wrote a separate 38-page judgment giving elaborate reasons why the Centre’s stand claiming privilege over the three defence documents needed to be rejected. He said, “In the writ petition out of which the review arises, the complaint is that there has been grave wrongdoing in the highest echelons of power and petitioners seek action under provisions of the Prevention of Corruption Act.”CJI Gogoi, writing for himself and Justice Kaul, said it was futile on the part of the Centre to claim privilege over the three documents and seek their deletion from court records as these were published in a newspaper and were in the public domain.“When the documents in question are already in public domain, we do not see how the protection under Section 8(1)(a) of the Right to Information Act would serve public interest,” the CJI said, rejecting the AG’s argument that even the RTI Act prohibited making public certain classified information pertaining to national security and defence of the country.Brushing aside the AG’s argument, the CJI said since the documents were within reach of citizens, “a practical and common sense approach would lead to the obvious conclusion that it would be meaningless and an exercise in utter futility for the court to refrain from reading and considering the said document or from shutting out its evidentiary worth and value”.The AG had also argued that certain matters, like defence procurements through inter-governmental agreements, were solely within the political domain and could not be questioned in courts. He had also sought dismissal of the review petitions, claiming that if kept alive, they had the potential to threaten citizens’ security.The CJI made light of the AG’s arguments and responded by citing the SC’s landmark Keshavananda Bharati judgment of 1973, in which a 13-judge bench had carved out the inviolable ‘basic structure’ of the Constitution.“That all constitutional interpretations have political consequences should not obliterate the fact that the decision has to be arrived at in the calm and dispassionate atmosphere of the court room, that judges in order to give legitimacy to their decision have to keep aloof from the din and controversy of politics and that the fluctuating fortunes of rival political parties can have for them only academic interest. Their primary duty is to uphold the Constitution and the laws without fear or favour and in doing so, they cannot allow any political ideology or economic theory, which may have caught their fancy, to colour the decision,” it said.