Crime Branch

A world apart from Sharma. There8217;s no rags-to-riches story lurking around in his background. No photographs of ramshackle homesteads, no village to hail him as a saviour. From all accounts, he was a child of privilege who wanted more. More than what his respectable job with the police could get him, more than what his official influence could win him, more than what a positive obituary could mean.

So he earned himself another distinction: as the seniormost police officer to be taken into custody. Ever. He is charged with dropping the names of five suspects from the Telgi chargesheet, not invoking MCOCA the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act on Telgi8217;s arrest in April 2002, and excluding the scamster8217;s wife and daughter from this FIR.

Going down with him in the Telgi scam is ACP M C Mulani, the twelfth policeman to be arrested in the case; he allegedly accepted Rs 15 crore for dropping Telgi8217;s relatives8217; names from a Pune chargesheet. The eleventh man in the net was ACP R B Yennan. A bit of an ironical arrest, because on November 17, 1998, he had arrested Tabrez Telgi 8212; the nephew of the scamster 8212; and seized fake stamps worth Rs 3.5 lakh in the market. Yennan is accused of going slow on the case.

Simple charges, in comparison with the ones against, say, Sridhar Vagal, joint commissioner of police, crime branch, Mumbai, who is accused of accepting Rs 76 lakh from Telgi and dereliction of duty, and ACP Gokul Patil, accused of sheltering the scamster by not including his name in an FIR and not seizing stamp paper machinery stolen from Nashik.

Mumbai ACP Babanrao Kadam also dealt in paper, but in another kind: examination papers. Not question-papers, like the notorious Ranjit Don, but answer scripts. Since June 2002, he has been in the Arthur Road jail, booked under the Prevention of Corruption Act along with senior officials of the Maharashtra Public Service Commission, and his wife.

Kadam allegedly took advantage of his proximity to former V-C of Mumbai University S D Karnik, when the latter was appointed head of the MPSC, to figure out how the examinations for police sub-inspector, assistant commissioner, deputy collector and sales tax officer work.

The next step was tapping examinees 8212; according to official records, the number is close to 600 8212; whose answer scripts Kadam would allegedly replace for a huge consideration.

When the Anti-Corruption Bureau raided his residence, they found a blank answer sheets of all MPSC examinations. Apart from Karnik and Kadam, P D Wani, who succeeded Karnik at the MPSC, is also in custody.

MONEY was apparently where the morality stopped for the late Haryana DGP jails Ramesh Sehgal as well. On December 11, 1996, a high-level team of the Haryana Vigilance Bureau, led by SP Alok Roy and overviewed by Joint Secretary Home Alok Nigam and Joint Secretary Vigilance P Raghvendra Rai quietly surrounded Sehgal8217;s residence and caught him red-handed while accepting Rs 50,000 from a convict who wanted his parole extended from three weeks to six months.

Sehgal was slapped with a case under the PCA, and retaliated by alleging that the entire operation was a set-up, a conspiracy of three jealous colleagues.

Interestingly, this wasn8217;t Sehgal8217;s first brush with the wrong side of the law. He had earlier been accused by a junior 8212; DIG V N Rai 8212; of minting money through a police recruitment scam. Then chief minister Bhajan Lal reacted by transferring him from one post to another 8212; and thence to Ambala Jail. Sehgal died of health complications while the PCA case was still in progress; the suspect recruitments were also scrapped.

Instead of being treated as examples, though, such cases 8212; even the ones that attract punitive action 8212; are largely considered aberrations, and swept under the carpet. What, otherwise, explains the case of Hare Krishna Medhi, additional SP Special Branch, Guwahati City Police? In June this year, an FIR accused him of abducting an officer of the Guwahati Refinery of the Indian Oil Corporation and attempting to extort money from him.

The story goes that Medhi allegedly picked up an IOC officer from the heart of the city on June 26, escorted him to a house in another locality, accused him of possessing contraband and running a prostitution racket and then asked him to cough up Rs 2 lakh.

Medhi, according to the FIR, also threatened to kill the refinery officer should he talk about the episode.

The officer, released on promising on deliver the money at a certain date, however, went straight to Guwahati City SP H K Nath. Nath laid a trap, and caught Medhi red-handed while accepting the money in his office.

8216;8216;But even before we could arrest him, he disappeared,8217;8217; says Nath. An arrest warrant was issued in his name, and Medhi was suspended; but the officer remained untraceable. He was finally tracked down to a local nursing home on July 7, arrested, sent to custody and released on bail on July 30.

While still under suspension, Medhi 8212; who has told the court he was being framed by some of his colleagues 8212; has not been chargesheeted. Chances are the case will fizzle out, because the complainant himself has been transferred out of Assam.

CHANCES are, though, that it won8217;t. Ask Meraj Sutreja, who fought for 27 years to see Additional DGP Training S S Khandwawala finally being sentenced to five years8217; rigorous imprisonment by a Junagadh court on September 30 this year.

The case dates back to October 1976, when Sutreja was arrested by Khandwawala, then a DSP, for allegedly possessing illegal weapons. The farmer pleaded that he had already deposited his licensed weapon, but he was kept in police custody for 36 hours despite complaining of chest pain.

After a month spent in and out of hospital, Sutreja left Mumbai8217;s Jaslok Hospital on a wheelchair on November 2, 1976. He filed a case of custodial torture the same month.

The day after the Junagadh court convicted Khandwawala and three other policemen, the ADGP challenged the order in Gujarat High Court. He is now out on bail.

If Khandwawala pleads that his actions were discharged in the line of duty, he could seek inspiration from the case of Ram Deo Tyagi. Indicted by the Srikrishna Commission for 8216;8216;excessive and unnecessary firing resulting in the death of nine persons in the Suleman Bakery incident8217;8217; during the 1992-93 riots in Mumbai, when he was head of the Crime Branch, Tyagi went on to become the city8217;s police commissioner, and later was nominated DG of the prestigious National Security Guards, New Delhi.

While the Sena-BJP government rejected the Srikrishna report 8212; thus nixing any possibility of action against Tyagi 8212; the Democratic Front government led by Vilasrao Deshmukh saw the registration of offences under Section 302 murder and 307 attempt to murder against Tyagi and his colleagues.

On the day the cases were registered, however, Tyagi was admitted to Bombay Hospital, and he remained there till he was granted bail. A decade later, Tyagi has been acquitted by the sessions court, which accepted his contention that actions taken by him were in due discharge of his duties.

Also charged with conspiracy to murder, Haryana IGP Ravi Kant Sharma can8217;t quite take the same plea. In possibly the most sensational cop case to hit the headlines in recent times, Sharma was accused of planning to kill The Indian Express journalist Shivani Bhatnagar, with whom he had allegedly been on intimate terms, in January 1999.

The arrest, though, came early this year, after Sharma had exhausted every scope for anticipatory bail. Interest in the case has been kept alive largely by default: wife Madhu went live on television to accuse then Union minister Pramod Mahajan of having a hand in the murder; his Panchkula house was raided frequently; his mother accused his wife of trying to grab her property.

This public drama, however, doesn8217;t take away from the seriousness of the charges. Sharma is accused of sending two persons to enter Bhatnagar8217;s Patparganj apartment in east Delhi under false pretences and then killing her. The tainted IGP 8212; now under suspension 8212; is currently in Tihar jail; charges have been framed in the case.

But Sharma is not the only senior cop to be facing murder charges. Raghavendra Awasthi, currently DIG Border, Assam Police, was an SP in Golaghat district, Assam, when a local youth named Jyoti Lohar went missing in October 1995. The son of a renowned trade union leader, Jyoti allegedly collected huge sums from truckers at illegal highway checkposts.

According to his fiancee8217;s complaint, Lohar was summoned one morning to the SP8217;s bungalow from her residence by an official police vehicle. He never came back.

The police allegedly refused to lodge a missing person FIR, so she moved Gauhati High Court, complaining that she suspected Awasthi in the disappearance. The court ordered a Golaghat district judge to investigate; following his report, it directed the Assam government to register a case and initiate departmental action against Awasthi.

As the high court rejected his bail plea, Awasthi rushed out of the courtroom, and from the court premises, despite the presence of a number of policemen. He remained underground for nearly two years, before finally being discovered in a nursing home in Ahmedabad in September 1998. Subsequently, Awasthi got bail; he is now DIG Border, Assam Police.

The case, however, remains alive in public memory. Awasthi has been chargesheeted in the Lohar case: Police investigations revealed that he was allegedly hand-in-glove with Lohar in the checkposts racket, and picked him up after Lohar failed to share the loot.

Former Haryana DGP Lachhman Das was less lucky. The Pehal murder case, which rocked the state in 1994, saw the officer behind bars; he is currently facing trial in the case in Ambala. Two other IPS officers, too, are under judicial scrutiny in the case.

The prime mover in the case has been Pehal8217;s mother Ishwarti Devi, who refused to buy the police line that her son 8212; allegedly a criminal 8212; was killed by unknown assailants while in police custody; she alleged that Pehal had been tied to a tree and shot dead.

The National Human Rights Commission turned up the heat, the CBI became involved and Das was sent behind bars, complaining that the whole story was a political conspiracy.

S S Rathi, then ACP, crime branch, Delhi police, had no such plea. In what then police commissioner Nikhil Kumar later described as a 8216;8216;genuine case of mistaken identity8217;8217;, Rathi and his team shot two businessmen at the busy Connaught Place-Barakhamba Road intersection in broad daylight in March 1997; they had presumed a much-wanted gangster was travelling in the car and didn8217;t want to give him a chance to escape. Rathi has since got bail.

The list of cop offences doesn8217;t stop at pecuniary gains or save-skin murder. The two most heinous cases involving police officers in recent times have to do with outraging the modesty of women.

R K Sharma, ACP, Delhi police, stands accused of raping his servant8217;s wife at gunpoint, allegedly in an inebriated state. The victim8217;s husband alleged in his FIR in Dehra Dun that he was sent away from the house on a pretext, and his wife assaulted by his employer. Medical examination confirmed the rape, and Sharma was arrested on August 22, 2002.

Far more sordid was the case of teenaged Ruchika Girhotra, allegedly molested by former Haryana DGP SPS Rathore on August 12, 1990.

Within three years of the alleged incident, Ruchika had committed suicide, her brother had been slapped with six cases of auto theft 8212; and even paraded handcuffed through the streets 8212; and her middle-class family hounded out of Panchkula as Rathore allegedly tried to pressure them into withdrawing the molestation complaint.

It might have ended that way had Madhu and Anand Prakash 8212; parents of Ruchika8217;s friend Reema, the only eye-witness to the alleged incident 8212; not refused to give up. In November 1997, they approached the Punjab and Haryana High Court, which ordered a CBI probe into the charges. Rathore moved the Supreme Court, which upheld the high court decision and ordered the probe to be completed within six months.

The CBI registered an FIR on December 29, 1999, and the chargesheet under Section 354 of the IPC in November 2000. On December 5, the special CBI court allowed the application for condonation of delay since the case was more than 10 years old; the Haryana government sent Rathore on leave the same day.

Rathore retired on July 31, 2002. Decisions in the two cases 8212; one at Ambala and another at Patiala 8212; are still awaited.

Far away in Mumbai, a certain Mr Sharma must be praying for similar delays.

Mukesh Bhardwaj, Puja Birla, Gautam Dheer, D Mahadevan, Milind Ghatwai, Samudra Gupta Kashyap and Prafulla Marpakwar