3 Officers Of The Court Appointed In Jmm Case

DIG Satish Chandra and SP Vivek Johri and former SP investigating the case, A K Sinha, have been made officers of the court. The judges directed that no one will interfere in the work of investigation of these officers and said they were free to approach the court for any direction or order if the need arose.

A division bench consisting of Justice Y K Sabharwal and Justice D K Jain directed that counsel for the government Madan Lokur inform the court of the investigations carried out by the income-tax department in the case.

The court also directed the Delhi police commissioner to render assistance to provide security to the witnesses or persons as and when required by the CBI.

Commencing his submissions, P N Lekhi, counsel for petitioner Ravinder Kumar, submitted that the burden of proof that the bribery had not taken place is on the accused according to the Prevention of Corruption Act. He recalled the JMM leaders had told the interrogators that when the then Prime Minister Narasimha Rao had sought their support in 1993, just before voting on the no-confidence motion, he had made three promises.

Lekhi, whose submissions lasted over 90 minutes, sought to know if any of the promises which had been made to the Jharkhand leaders had been fulfilled. On the contrary, he contended, prima facie it had been established that payments were made to the four MPs to secure their support. He further said the payoffs case was one of crime without victims and since these crimes were committed with the utmost secrecy, the court will have to go by circumstantial evidence to establish the charges.

Submitting that the court had nothing more to observe in the case, Lekhi urged the judges not to give the CBI any more time to file the chargesheet. Alleging that the CBI had been trying to put one block after another to prevent the truth from coming out, he further said that such a situation should not be allowed to come where future generations could say that democracy was on sale.

CBI counsel Gopal Subramaniam presented three files to the judges containing the progress report, the file containing the notings and the case diary. He informed the court that the new team probing the case had been constituted after his advice to CBI director Joginder Singh and he had advised the investigating officials that their conduct should reflect that they were officers of the court.

To ensure continuity after the constitution of the new team, the division bench directed that A K Sinha, the SP who was earlier assigned the case, be made a part of the team again.

Sinha had since been taken off the probe and sent to Silchar in connection with some investigations. After being taken off the probe, Sinha had reportedly written to the CBI director that he be repatriated to his parent cadre, Kerala.

The Delhi High Court has directed that three CBI officials associated with the JMM bribery probe be made officers of the court and there should be no interference in their work. The chargesheet in the case is to be filed by October 29.