Utsav Bains: Who is he and what brought him in the eye of the storm in SC?

Bains has earlier been involved in the Rohtak Apna Ghar case and also represents witnesses in the Asaram case

After a former employee of Supreme Court accused Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi of sexual harassment and persecution, a 32-year-old advocate Utsav Singh Bains claimed there was a conspiracy to frame the CJI.

Bains on Saturday in a Facebook post said he will file an affidavit with "evidence of conspiracy against CJI Gogoi by a lobby of disgruntled judges, SC fixers, corporate scamsters and a few corrupt politicans- All who have meticulously planned the conspiracy to force the CJI to resign as their 'Corrupt works were not going through in SC"(sic).

Bains, a practicing advocate at Supreme Court and moved to New Delhi from Chandigarh two years ago,  submitted his documentary evidence to the apex court in a sealed cover on Wednesday, claiming the the CCTV footage will reveal many things. In the affidavit filed in SC, he mentioned no name of any "disgruntled judge or corrupt politicians".

"At around 5 pm on 4thApril, 2019, an unknown person came to meet the Deponent at his office. That, the person named himself Ajay and claimed to be a relative of a lady who has since become a complainant against the Hon’ble Chief Justice of India (CJI)," read the affidavit.

Bains in his post claimed that when he refused the person, he offered him Rs 50 lakh as his legal fees if he agreed to be his lawyer and asked him specifically to organise a press conference at the PCI.

When Bains refused him again, the man offered him Rs 1.5 crore to take up the case.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday said it would go to the root of the claims made by Bains.

“We will inquire. We will go to the root of alleged claims of fixers at work and manipulating judiciary. If they continue to work…none of us will survive. Fixing has no role to play in the system. We will take it to the logical end" the three-judge bench of Justices Arun Mishra, Rohinton Nariman and Deepak Gupta said.

"We request the Director of Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), the Director of Intelligence Bureau (IB) and the Commissioner of Police, Delhi, to report to this court and request them to seize the relevant material in order to support the contents of the affidavit furnished by the officer of the court, Mr Utsav Singh Bains, Advocate," the court said in a closed-door meeting in its order.

The court also saw a heated exchange between Attorney General KK Venugopal and lawyer Utsav Bains.

The 32-year-old lawyer is the son of human rights lawyer R S Bains and grandson of former judge of Punjab and Haryana High Court Ajit Singh Bains. He is a law graduate from Panjab University. He also attended a program on Child Right's advocacy at Harvard Law School. 

In 2012, he had filed a plea on investigation into sexual exploitation of childrens at a Rohtak shelter in Haryana, which was later probed by the CBI. He has also been representing some witnesses in the Asaram sexual exploitation case.