Capping a nine-year trial, a Delhi court on Friday sentenced Sanjeev Nanda to five years imprisonment for mowing down six persons with his BMW and tampering with evidence.
NEW DELHI: Capping a nine-year trial, a Delhi court on Friday sentenced Sanjeev Nanda to five years imprisonment for mowing down six persons with his BMW and tampering with evidence.
“The question is whether a man on the road is safe and whether drunken drivers would keep on committing such offences. This accountability to society can only be suitably answered if a substantial jail term is provided to him,” additional sessions judge Vinod Kumar said.
Businessman Rajiv Gupta, found guilty of destroying evidence, was given one year imprisonment and a fine of Rs10,000. His two domestic help Bhola Nath and Shyam Singh, also held guilty of destroying evidence, were sentenced to six months and fined Rs100 each.
All three were given bail on a surety of Rs10,000 each.
The court had on Tuesday convicted the 30-year-old businessman under Section 304(2) of the IPC that prescribes a maximum punishment of 10 years and fine for culpable homicide not amounting to murder instead of treating it as a case of mere rash and negligent driving.
Drawing a parallel with Alistair Pareira’s case in which the Bombay high court had a year ago awarded three years jail term besides a fine of Rs5 lakh to the Mumbai youth for running over and killing seven persons, the court said, “If the present case is compared with Pareira’s case, it would be found that the case of Nanda was much more grave.”
Comparing different aspects of the two cases, the court said Nanda had consumed more alcohol than Pareira and hit the persons standing on the road while in the Mumbai case the victims were sleeping on the footpath.
The plea of Nanda that the victims’ family members had been suitably compensated was appreciated by the court, which, however, said accountability toward society could be answered only with “substantial” jail term.
Nanda is the son of private arms dealer Suresh Nanda and a grandson of former naval chief SM Nanda. At the time of the crash, Nanda was home for holidays from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business.
Prosecutors said Nanda and two of his friends, Siddhartha Gupta and Manik Kapoor, were returning drunk from a party at 4.30 am on January 10, 1999, when their BMW, speeding at roughly 135 kph, crashed into six people standing along an empty street.
After running over the six persons, Nanda reversed his car on the bodies of his victims, crushing them for a second time. Three policemen and three labourers died.
Though the cops had arrested Nanda and his friends soon after the accident, it took them more than nine years to get him convicted as two of the three crucial eyewitnesses had turned hostile.
The sole remaining eyewitness Sunil Kulkarni also changed his statements several times,
weakening the police case.
Dressed in a beige kurta, Nanda was taken to Tihar jail soon after the sentence was pronounced.
Nanda’s nine months in jail will be counted as time served.
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