'Don't travel by air': Justice Vikram Nath waves off plea on soaring airfares

A plea against soaring airfares got a one-line answer in the Supreme Court on Monday morning.

When the matter was mentioned before Justice Vikram Nath, counsel argued that fares had gone through the roof. “The airfares have increased to 700%. It is an essential service. Violation of Article 14,” the lawyer told the bench, invoking the constitutional guarantee of equality before the law.

The judge was not persuaded. “Don’t travel by air. Next case,” Justice Nath said, and the court moved on. No order was passed on the mention.

Mentioning is the start-of-day routine in which lawyers ask a bench to list a case urgently. Monday was also the first day of a new registry rule that bars senior advocates from making oral mentions, leaving the task to junior counsel.

The rest of the morning

Elsewhere in the building, a bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justices Joymalya Bagchi and V Mohana was due to take up a plea by activists Aruna Roy and Nikhil Dey against “blanket” prohibitory orders under Section 144 of the old Criminal Procedure Code that stop public meetings in the run-up to Lok Sabha and Assembly elections. An earlier bench led by Justice B R Gavai had directed that applications for such meetings be decided by the authorities within three days of being filed.

The same bench was also listed to hear petitions seeking a CBI probe into alleged theft of donations to the Ram temple in Ayodhya. Other benches had a plea by former Tamil Nadu minister K N Nehru against a Madras High Court direction to register a corruption FIR against him, and the continuing hearing on petitions seeking changes to the NEET examination run by the National Testing Agency.