There are paeans of praise for the judicial system that sentenced Salman Khan to five years, apparently indicating that everybody is equal in the eyes of the law.
In fact, the verdict signifies exactly the opposite: it took 13 long years for the police and the prosecution to get their act together. The “prime” witness, his bodyguard constable Ravindra Patil, who was present in the car and testified in court, was under pressure to retract.
For his pains, he was removed as a special operations squad (SOS) commando. He crumbled under the pressure and went missing after his first testimony. He was jailed for absenteeism but testified again while a prisoner in 2006.
After he was released the following year, he was found stricken with TB and died. He should have been protected as a witness who, Mumbai’s public prosecutor said Wednesday, helped in nailing Khan.
The police and courts were also remiss in not ensuring that the compensation of Rs 19 lakh that Khan paid reached the victims’ families due to procedural glitches.
6 prominent people who got away
Other prominent people have got away with fatal car accidents due to the flat-footedness of the legal system. In 1993, Puru, actor Raaj Kumar’s son, ran over eight people, also on a Bandra pavement, and killed three.
Despite being convicted, the court ordered him to pay Rs 30,000 each to the relatives of the dead and Rs 5,000 to the injured. He didn’t spend a day in prison.
In 1999, Sanjeev Nanda, grandson of former navy chief S M Nanda, ploughed through a checkpoint on Delhi’s Lodhi Road in his BMW in the wee hours, killing three constables and three others.
He allegedly got out to inspect the damage, saw victims writhing under the car and drove away. He was acquitted that year but retried and sentenced in 2008 to two years. The Supreme Court in 2012 reduced this to time served, with a fine and two years of community service.
NDTV had conducted a sting where defence lawyers were trying to bribe a witness. They were barred from practicing for a meagre four months.
Neel Chatterjee, a former senior executive of Standard Chartered Bank, lost control of his Mercedes and allegedly killed a security guard on a Mumbai road in 2006. He was only charged with rash and negligent driving and the case was disposed of.
In 2005, the former secretary of the then Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray drove his car into a bus stop near Vile Parle police station, killing two women, allegedly under the influence. The car was also wrongly registered and, to date, he has been acquitted the registration case this March.
In 2006, Alistair Pereira climbed on to a pavement in his Toyota, also in Bandra, killing seven workers sleeping there and injuring six. In his trial in 2007, which lasted just a week, he was sentenced to only six months for rash and negligent driving. Once again, the police botched the probe.
The chief justice of Bombay High Court ordered a retrial and he was convicted of culpable homicide and given three years. The Supreme Court upheld this judgement in 2012.
In 2010, Nooriya Haveliwala, 30, banged into a taxi and a police van at Marine Lines in Mumbai, killing a motorcyclist and a sub-inspector. The police alleged that she was under the influence.
A special court sentenced her to five years for culpable homicide, against which she has appealed in the High Court. She is currently out on bail.
How many can get bail in two hours?
In Salman’s case, the sessions court inexplicably refused to charge his driver, who emerged from a 13-year hibernation, with perjury for claiming he was driving the car. This would have set a precedent in other cases where the defence fabricates evidence.
In all the exultation about the fairness of the system, spare a thought for thousands of impoverished undertrial prisoners, including women and children, who await hearings for years, sometimes for stealing money as trifling as Rs 50. They can’t get bail ever, certainly not in a couple of hours.
(The author is a senior Mumbai-based journalist.)
(At The Quint, we are answerable only to our audience. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member. Because the truth is worth it.)