The mere act of offering a bribe to a government servant is enough to get you charged with abetment under the Prevention of Corruption Act, even if the servant concerned did not accept your bribe, the Bombay high court has ruled.
The mere act of offering a bribe to a government servant is enough to get you charged with abetment under the Prevention of Corruption Act, even if the servant concerned did not accept your bribe, the Bombay High Court has ruled.
The ruling, which would be considered par for the course in many Western democracies, came recently in a case of attempting to bribe a police officer in Solapur.
The ruling is also significant because it comes at a time when some intellectuals, including a senior economic adviser to the prime minister, have been claiming that corruption could be brought under check by decriminalising the act of offering a bribe and only penalising the one who takes the bribe.
Abetment of any offence is also punishable under the Prevention of Corruption Act, Justice BR Gavai said. In such cases, whether the public servant concerned accepted the bribe is of no consequence, he said.
The court was hearing a petition filed by Rajkumar Narute, a journalist from Solapur, who was arrested for offering Rs3,000 as bribe to Vikas Ramugade, senior police inspector. Ramgude refused the bribe and lodged a police complaint against Narute instead.
VV Purvant, Narute’s advocate, said the police had targeted Narute as he had exposed corruption in the traffic department. Instead of transferring the alleged bribery case to the Anti-Corruption Bureau, Solapur police commissioner Himmatrao Deshbhratar directed Shirish Tandalekar, assistant commissioner of police (traffic), to inquire into the matter, Purvant said. “When the allegations are against the traffic department, how can one of its officers investigate?”
Shyam Marwadi, counsel for the Solapur police (commissioner, ACP and senior inspector), said the deputy superintendent of police (DSP) and inspector of the ACB were not available when the offence was registered against Narute. The PCA makes it mandatory to hand over the investigation to an officer not below the rank of DSP, Marwadi said.
The commissioner said in his affidavit that he had asked the ACP (traffic) to investigate the matter because he had worked in the ACB for more than four years.
As far as Narute’s news report was concerned, Deshbhratar had asked Tandelkar to inquire into it and the officer concerned was found guilty, Marwadi said.
The court said the commissioner’s action of asking the ACP (traffic) to investigate the matter could not be termed malafide, but it directed the police to hand over the case documents to the ACB at the earliest.
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