A Delhi court on Tuesday held Sanjeev Nanda guilty of driving his BMW in drunken stupor over six people and killing all of them almost a decade ago.
Faces up to 10 years in prison
NEW DELHI: A Delhi court on Tuesday held Sanjeev Nanda guilty of driving his BMW in drunken stupor over six people and killing all of them almost a decade ago.
Three constables, two from Delhi police and one from CRPF, were among the six who died after being hit by the speeding BMW in south Delhi’s Lodhi Colony in the early hours of January 10, 1999.
The quantum of sentence, which could be a maximum of 10 years in prison, will be announced on Wednesday and Sanjeev, 30, will have the option of challenging the verdict in a higher court.
Sanjeev, son of arms dealer Suresh Nanda and grandson of former Navy chief SM Nanda, was taken into custody after the judgment even as his family members, including his grandmother, watched in tears.
Their feelings were summed up by defence counsel Ramesh Gupta. “Now the media would be elated as the acquittal of Sanjeev Nanda would have meant travesty of justice,” he said sarcastically.
Additional sessions judge Vinod Kumar, who convicted Sanjeev under section 304 (Part II) — culpable homicide not amounting to murder — of the IPC, had some harsh words for him.
“If a drunken person drives a vehicle in a highly rash or dangerous manner and thereby kills a human being, this offence goes beyond the purview of section 304A (rash and negligent driving) of the IPC and such gross recklessness should fall within the purview of section 300 (murder),” judge Kumar wrote in the 87-page judgment.
The defence had pleaded that Sanjeev could at best be convicted under Section 304A of the IPC (causing death by rash and negligent act), which carries a maximum of two years in jail.
The court also convicted three others — businessman Rajeev Gupta and his two employees Bhola Nath and Shyam Singh — for destruction of evidence as they had washed the bloodstains on the BMW.
Manik Kapoor, Sanjeev’s friend who was in the vehicle at the time of the accident, was acquitted.
The trial saw several ups and downs over the last decade as two of the three eyewitnesses turned hostile and the most crucial witness, Sunil Kulkarni, changed his statement seven times. And the biggest twist came only recently when the court held senior lawyer RK Anand, who was representing Sanjeev, and special public prosecutor IU Khan guilty of obstructing justice. A TV channel had caught Khan and Anand trying to “buy off” Kulkarni. The Delhi high court on August 21 debarred both Anand and Khan from appearing in courts for four months.
Kulkarni, a Mumbai-based trader who was dropped as a witness after being termed “won over”, was recalled in March last year. He told the court that though he had seen Sanjeev in the car but he was not behind the wheel.
“It must be kept in mind that he (Kulkarni) was facing a public prosecutor (Khan) who was acting in collusion with defence counsel Anand,” judge Kumar said.
Corroborating his testimony with the videotape shot by the police on the day of the incident, the court said: “He is telling the same story which is being spoken by the scene of crime.”
Describing Kulkarni as a character direct from the novels of Charles Dickens, the judge said such people with strange aspect to their personality were not uncommon.
“This is simply not a case of hobnobbing between the defence counsel and prosecution but also at some stage in the background, the investigating officer has been influenced and deliberately indulges in such perfunctory investigation that it causes serious prejudice to the prosecution,” the court said.
The police had to build the case on forensic and circumstantial evidence to nail Sanjeev. And luck also favoured investigators who had found a broken piece of the BMW’s registration plate at the accident site. The prosecution also linked the BMW to the accident by trailing the engine oil that had started to leak from the car after the accident.
Ups and Downs
Hostile witnesses: As soon after the trial began, two of the three eyewitnesses turned hostile proving the police theory wrong in the courtroom
Wasted time: Sanjeev Nanda refused to give blood samples to the police to match them with bloodstains found in the car. Police had to move the court to get them. Almost five months were wasted in this
Curious Kulkarni: Sunil Kulkarni, also an eyewitness, changed his statements seven times in court and many believed that he had been bought off. But in March 2007, the court decided to call him back to depose against Sanjeev Nanda.
The sting: The biggest twist in the tale came after defence counsel RK Anand and public prosecutor IU Khan were caught on camera, in a sting operation carried out by a news channel, offering money to Kulkarni to turn hostile
The final nail: Taking note of the sting operation, which ultimately helped nail Sanjeev Nanda, the Delhi high court debarred both the lawyers from courts for four months.
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