NEW DELHI: Supreme Court‘s nine-judge bench led by CJI DY Chandrachud on Thursday extended their regular time schedule till 6 pm to conclude long-drawn arguments depicting intense tussle between Centre and states to regulate industrial alcohol, which is subjected to further processing to manufacture intoxicating liquor and over which the states have absolute control.
A bench of the CJI, and Justices Hrishikesh Roy, AS Oka, BV Nagarathna, JB Pardiwala, Manoj Misra, Ujjal Bhuyan, SC Sharma and A G Masih refused to allow the arguments, which commenced on April 2, to spill over to the next week. As the proceedings concluded at the stroke of 6pm and the bench reserved its verdict, Justice Roy said, “The interminable arguments over liquor have finally come to an end. Hope it ends with happy hours.”
It evoked wry smiles from exhausted counsel: solicitor general Tushar Mehta for the Centre and states represented by a host of senior advocates – Dinesh Dwivedi, Arvind Datar, V Giri, Jaideep Gupta and Balbir Singh, all of whom fought sportingly to persuade the bench to see reason in their stand on a tricky constitutional question that had overlapping impact on regulating entries in the central list, state list as well as the interplay of Industries (Development and Regulation) Act, 1951.