34-year battle exposes a court of law, not a court of justice

A high-profile case that made headlines across the world when it first happened, hit magazine covers, and even made it to the Guinness Book of Records — was recently quietly closed in a magistrate’s court after 34 long years. Not with a bang, but a whimper, to quote TS Eliot.  

The grinding legal battle, amongst the longest-running in Delhi’s lower courts,  left in its wake a trail of broken lives and businesses. At the centre of it was Rajendra Singh Sethia — a man who was described in the international press as “the biggest bankrupt in the world”, whose ruin makes Vijay Mallya’s bankruptcy seem like a tea-party in comparison. 

The most telling part of this story has been its denouement. The judgement delivered by sitting magistrate Pawan Singh Rajawat on March 19 this year, which finally brought the curtains down on a case that has moved backwards — from the Supreme Court to the High Court and finally dragging on for three decades in the grimy corridors of the Tees Hazari lower courts — is nothing short of a stinging indictment of the CBI and its methods. 

The story of how a multi-billion dollar international trading conglomerate went from boom to bust, of how Sethia went from a penthouse suite in the Oberoi Hotel to Tihar Jail overnight, is the stuff of Hollywood films. 

While there were factors that triggered the fall of Sethia, including two military coups in Africa where he ran a successful trading business — it was the cases filed by the CBI that dealt the death blow to his vast business empire. 

The CBI has long been accused of being a handmaiden to governments, used at will to serve political expediencies. In Sethia’s case too, he was the incidental victim of an attempt by a former Union Finance Minister to discredit a predecessor.   

Charges of bank fraud were hastily filed, crudely investigated and quickly forgotten. Time passed, and both politicians went on to have meteoric careers. One went on to become a Prime Minister and the other a President of India. But for Sethia, thrown under the bus by the CBI and caught up in  the interminable wheels of the lower courts, there was no easy way out. 

None of the banks he had supposedly defrauded filed any case against him. Instead, they came forward to say they had recovered all their losses and more from his sureties. 

No witnesses came ahead to testify against him. A disinterested CBI, in the absence of further political orders, sought one adjournment after the other. Such was the fear of the investigating agencies in the lower courts, that young magistrates — worried about their career prospects and promotions — simply avoided passing any judgement. Investigating officers who had no clue what was being probed, simply chose not to show up for hearings; magistrates never read the case files. 

Decades slipped by and magistrates, who would have been in their diapers at the time Sethia was arrested, came and went. With criminal charges pending against him, Sethia could do no business overseas nor salvage his losses. 

He could not travel abroad without permission. His co-accused died of old age.  A whole multi-billion dollar business empire spread across continents unraveled irretrievably.

Used and misused by successive governments, the CBI’s rate of conviction on major crimes is a shockingly abysmal 3.96%, according to Vigilance Commissioner R Sri Kumar. 

Sethia’s case was finally closed in March this year, not because he won a dramatic legal victory, but because of a High Court directive to the lower courts to clear all cases older than 30 years. 

The judgement when it finally came was bereft of any justice. It said merely that the CBI never had a case against Sethia to begin with.

Author is a writer