First Time in History of CESTAT?
THIS is perhaps the first time in the history of CESTAT that three Technical Members of the Tribunal not agreeing with the decision of the Judicial Members including the President and that too on a purely judicial matter. A Judicial Member once told me that he was amazed at the jurisprudential knowledge and judicial mind of some technical members and he has learnt quite a bit of law from them.
Moulvi Sapru vs Pandit Jinnah. Dr.Tej Bahadur Sapru argued a case in which he was pitted against Mohd. Ali Jinnah. There was an original document in Persian which had to be deciphered and the counsel of the parties were requested to read it out for the benefit of the court. Mr. Jinnah miserably failed and betrayed his profound ignorance of Persian, whereas Mr.Sapru fluently read out the entire document. This created a sensation and the next morning's newspapers commented in flaming headlines - 'Pandit Jinnah vs Moulvi Sapru'.
That, certainly was not the case here.
In Cadila Pharma - , the President did not agree with the order written by the Judicial Member and the Technical Member agreed with the President and so the President's view prevailed.
But there seems to have been no occasion when the President's opinion had been overruled by technical members - not that the President enjoys any special status in the Bench.