The public lynching of Prof. Sabharwal by ABVP leaders during Students’ Union elections in an Ujjain college, caught on camera by TV channels, shocked the entire country. Three years later, it is even more shocking that all the accused have been acquitted by a Nagpur Court. All the eyewitnesses turned hostile, and the Court failed to convict, stating insufficient evidence. Sabharwal’s son has pointed out that the prosecution was not serious and suppressed evidence. The MP Government has ensured that the case be weakened and the result is this patent miscarriage of justice.
In the BMW hit-and-run case of 1998, Sanjeev Nanda, from a rich and influential family, mowed down six people on a Delhi pavement in his BMW car while driving drunkenly at night. Convicted by a trial court for 5 years, Nanda got a major relief now when the Delhi High Court reduced his sentence to two years, which means he can leave jail in two months.
The HC held that the trail court was wrong to convict Nanda under Section 304 IPC (Culpable homicide not amounting to murder), and rather held him guilty of ‘rash and negligent driving’ (304A), which holds a maximum sentence of two years. In a rash of similar cases in the past years Courts have taken a similar stance. In 2007, the Supreme Court, while similarly reducing a five year sentence to two years, had called for a tougher law on drunken driving.
The victims of such crimes are invariably of the same class that are being killed at construction sites all over Delhi – migrant, homeless workers forced to sleep on streets. A culpable homicide conviction requires that the perpetrator have “knowledge” that his actions can cause death, though he may not intend to kill. The HC has argued that Nanda lacked this knowledge because he had not driven into a crowd; he did not know that there were people on the pavement. The Court said, “Even if it is assumed that the appellant was in a state of drunkenness but still he had taken the risk of driving the vehicle knowing that his act would endanger the lives of others, but with the hope that it will not..” If he “knew his act would endanger others,” surely Nanda and others like him ought to qualify for culpable homicide? One wonders if hit-and-run cases would receive the same leniency if their victims were from Nanda’s own class – rather than invariably homeless migrant workers.
The Court has tried to cushion this leniency with stern words about the Nanda family’s attempts to destroy evidence, buy witnesses and influence police and prosecution; about the rich believing themselves to be above the law; and about the plight of the victims’ families whose lives have been plunged into darkness by a singular act of this young man who for his own enjoyment was stalking the roads of Delhi as a merchant of death.” But such words are no punishment for Nanda, whose family is speaking as though their son was a victim of injustice rather than a “merchant of death.” The verdict has been taken as vindication rather than rebuke!
These two recent judgements are sorry testimony to the fact that the rich and politically influential can indeed get away with murder. They must be challenged in a higher court and public campaigns must be brought to bear on them to demand justice.
