1 Friends, when the lock down started , in Mumbai Police amd local govt came out with the rule that a person is not allowed to take out his/her vehicle unless he/she is working for essential services, and for that permission had to be taken from Police after submitting all the relevant papers. After sometimes there came the law that you can not move beyond 2 km of your residence, and the instructions were changed so many times that Mumbaikars got confused. During that period Police impounded many vehicles when they found , the person who is driving the vehicle could not give valid reason for coming out of the residence. Now reclaiming the same vehicles for Mumbaikars have become a tedious and expensive task.
During last month in about 15 such cases, accused who were booked under sections of Indian Penal Code (IPC) were granted interim custody of their seized cars and motorbikes. However, they had to furnish indemnity bonds dictated by the value of car/motorbike, some as hefty as Rs 4 Lakh, and deposit cash sureties ranging from Rs 5000 to Rs 15,000. Offenders were left with no choice, when they claimed they are falsely implicated. Allowing pleas for return of seized property, one of the magistrate remarked “ He (offender) has breeched the lockdown order on movement and gathering in public places, causing danger of spread of coronavirus. The applicant seems to have prima facie committed the offence.” The court however granted interim custody of vehicle to avoid damage and rusting. The court ordered that owners to submit three pictures of the vehicle from different angles and forbid them to parting, renting or destroying the vehicle. The offender had to submit these pictures along with copy of RC book, insurance, license to the police station, which police has file in the court along with final report, at the time of final hearing for the judgement for the final verdict in the case.
Most of the offenders were booked under IPC section 188 (disobedience to order duly promulgated by public servant) and section 269 (negligent act likely to spread infection) and provisions of National Disaster Management Act and Epidemic Act. My contention is when Police announced all these restriction on taking vehicles out of your residence, along with that they should have announced all these IPC rules and quantum of fines and procedures to be followed if your vehicle is impounded by the police, once you are found to break these guidelines during the lock down. If the people were knowing in advance that they have to face such a big hassles to claim their vehicles back then most of them would not have dared to venture taking their vehicle out. But what to do, our law makers are in habit of making public life miserable rather then helping them or making their life easier.
2 Yesterday the special Narcotics Drugs & Psychotropic Substance (NDPS) court in Mumbai granted a bail to 3 drug peddlers. Among them 2 were women who were caught peddling heroin with over 50 gram each, while man was caught with 2 kg of ganja while peddling the same. The court accepted their bail plea, when their defence counsel pleaded that the drugs recovered from them were of intermediate quantity- between small and commercial quantities. The judge said that in these cases stringent provisions of section 37 of NDPS act did not apply. Under this act 5 gm of heroin is defines as small quantity and commercial quantity is 250 gm. Similarly for ganja small quantity is 1 kg anf commercial quantiry is 25 kg.
Now take the case of Rhea Chakravorty and her brother, her lawyer had argued there were no drug found with them, and therefore they can not be booked for non bailable sections merely on allegations that Sushant Singh Rajput used her and her brother to procure small quantity for his consumption. He further added there was not only no drug recovered from them, the basis of the case is some old messages which establishes nothing. This only proves that provision of our law varies from person to person, and in case of high profile cases it becomes stringent. Now in Rhea’s case there have been too many allegations on her , starting from supplying drub, transferring Sushant’s money to her personal account, murdering him, abetment of suicide etc etc. None of these allegations have been proven till date and the NDPS court jurisdiction is related to drug handling case, then why she has not been granted bail till date, If her involvement in other crimes are proved in the future then she can again be arrested by police.
Waiting for your comments/views/feed backs.
Anil Malik
Mumbai, India
7th Oct 2020.
R. N. Mungale.
Motorists were unnessrily troubled. Nothing will come out of Rhea’s case.