Chief Justice of the Andhra Pradesh High Court Prashant Kumar Mishra, during the third day’s hearing of the petition filed by the Amaravati Parirakshana Samithi against the proposed three capitals on Wednesday, wondered what exactly the proposed ‘judicial capital’ meant, while pointing that no State had come up with a proper definition of it in the past.
Mr. Justice Mishra observed that a temporary office of the Institution of Lokayukta had already been opened and functional in Kurnool, which was intended to be developed as the judicial capital.
‘Breach of trust’
Meanwhile, continuing his arguments on behalf of the aggrieved farmers, senior advocate Shyam Divan insisted that the court should have a national perspective of the whole issue, with specific attention to the systematic manner in which the Land Pooling Scheme (LPS) had been destroyed, as similar schemes in the country in the future would suffer badly if there was a breach of trust by the governments like it happened in the present instance.
He asserted that the decision-making on the capital at the time of the birth of the successor State of Andhra Pradesh was supposed to be a one-time process, and that the government could not hark back on the location of the capital as the decision thereof was taken previously, huge sums were invested and rights vested in the farmers and, more importantly, the Central government was involved in it by virtue of the passage of the A.P. Reorganisation Act, 2014, in Parliament.
Central funds
Apart from that, the funds provided by the Centre (₹2,500 crore) were to be spent on designated infrastructure in Amaravati, and the grounded contracts worth thousands of crores of rupees ought to be honoured.
Mr. Divan said that if the government wanted to have decentralised development, there were other ‘less invasive ways’ of doing it, and splitting the capital into three parts on that pretext was unjustifiable.
Continuity of governance
Basically, the impugned legislations should have passed the tests of reasonableness and rationality, and there was also the principle of non-retrogression that was espoused by the Supreme Court through various judgments.
There was a wilful departure from the priorities and timelines laid out in the Amaravati master plan, which was still existent, and the crux of the issue was the destruction of the LPS under which about 30,000 farmers had given away their lands by volition, Mr. Divan said, adding that continuity of governance was the bottom line.
