NEW DELHI: The Delhi High Court last week dismissed senior Congress leader H.K.L. Bhagat’s plea to quash the charges of murder, rioting and unlawful assembly framed against him by a lower court in two 1984 anti-Sikh riot cases. In a brief order pronounced, Justice N.G. Nandi held that in the light of facts and circumstances of the case, the order framing charges against the petitioner (Bhagat) does not appear to be incorrect, illegal or against the propriety so as to call for interference by this court. Holding Bhagat’s two separate revision petitions to quash the proceedings in the two cases as “devoid of merit,” Justice Nandi said that they were discussed.
Justice Nandi also vacated the interim stay that he had granted on the proceedings in the trail court of Additional Sessions Judge S.N. Dhingra, where the matter is due to come up next on September 7. Dhingra, had framed the charges of murder, rioting and unlawful assembly against the Congress strongman on the deposition of two riot widows Satnami Bai and Darshan Kaur alleging that he abetted a mob that killed their husbands in Trilokpuri (East Delhi) following the assassination of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on October 31, 1984. Justice Nandi ruled that “at this stage even a strong suspicion founded upon materials leading the court to form a presumptive opinion as to the existence of the factual ingredients constituting the offence alleged, may justify the framing of charges.” “What is relevant at this stage is only the sufficiency of the grounds’ for proceeding against the accused and not whether the materials on record are sufficient for conviction or not. The purpose of Section 228 (under which the charges were framed) is to ensure that the court should be satisfied that the accusation made against the accuse dos not frivolous,” he added. Senior counsel D.D. Thakur, appearing for Bhagat, had contended that the unverified statements of the two widows appearing as prosecution witnesses before Dhingra in January this year were cryptic and could not be used to frame charges against the former Congress MP.
Article extracted from this publication >> September 4, 1996
