Crime & Punishment

By the time the policemen found human remains in the tandoor, Sharma had disappeared. According to investigators, Sharma, who later claimed that Naina Sahni, a Congress activist, was his wife, had shot her dead at her Gole Market house, cut the body into pieces and tried to dispose them off in the tandoor.

EIGHT days later, after a chase from Delhi to Jaipur to Mumbai to Bangalore, Sharma was tracked down and arrested. Sharma and Keshav Kumar were charged with murder and attempt to destroy evidence. Three others, Jai Prakash Pehlwan, Rishi Raj Rathi and Ram Prakash Sachdeva were accused of harbouring Sharma.

As investigators pieced together the crime and the motive—Sahni was said to be in a relationship with another Congress member so the motive investigators said was jealousy—the case proceeded slowly. Four-and-half years later, in September 1999, following an appeal by the restaurant owner Keshav Kumar, day-to-day hearings were finally started.

Even then, there were other hurdles. The prosecution, it was alleged, had left some obvious loopholes. It even moved additional sessions Judge G P Thareja to say, ‘‘The State is acting as if it is in link with the accused. It has created loopholes. Why is the State behaving like this?’’ On more than one occasion, the judge slammed the public prosecutor for the handling of the case.

On an earlier occasion, the case was transferred from Thareja to another judge, after which it was debated whether such a long-standing and high-profile case should be transferred. It was subsequently brought back to the ASJ’s court.

In July 2003, the court was informed that the DNA tests had proven that the recovered body parts were those of Naina Sahni.

FINALLY, on November 7, 2003, Thareja sentenced Sushil Sharma to death, remarking on the particularly brutal nature of the murder and the attempt to dispose the body. Keshav Kumar was acquitted of the murder charge but was found guilty of helping in destroying the evidence. Pehlwan, Rathi and Sachdeva were acquitted of charges of hiding Sharma. The court also ordered the Chief Metropolitan Magistrate to prosecute DK Rao, then resident commissioner of Gujarat Bhawan, for allegedly harbouring Sharma.

Sharma was finally convicted after an eight-year legal proceeding but appealed the lower court’s decision at the High Court in December, 2003. The case is still being heard—the defence counsel has completed its contention.