Alteration of charges: CBI court dismisses suspended cop's plea

Ramkrishan Upadhyay

Chandigarh, August 29

The CBI court has dismissed an application of Jaswinder Kaur, former SHO of the Mani Majra police station, filed under Section 227 of the Criminal Procedure Code for alteration of charges by dropping charges against her.

Kaur filed the application in view of the order of the Punjab and Haryana High Court passed on August 9, 2021 while disposing of her plea in which she said the charges were framed without providing a complete set of challan documents to her.

The High Court disposed of her petition with a direction to the trial court that the proceedings before it will remain stayed till the time a cloned copy of the voice sample and the CCTV footage, along with the CFSL report, are supplied to the petitioner to enable her to put up her defence to the prosecution witness. The petitioner was also granted liberty that in case any report comes in her favour, she may move an appropriate application for alteration of charges.

In the application, Jaswinder said after the perusal of the micro SD card and the audio files, it came to notice that certain inaudible parts were favouring her, which had not been mentioned in the transcription, and showed that no case was made out against her.

Sameer Sachdev, counsel for the accused, argued that earlier when the charges were framed, complete challan was not supplied to the accused. He said the prosecution places reliance upon not audible parts, where it implicates the present accused, but when the not audible part is heard in the court, it also shows that another accused, Bhagwan Singh, says at a particular place that he gave the amount to Randhir. As a result, it was argued that no amount was received as bribe by the present accused, and this was the only case against her. Therefore, she deserves to be discharged and the charges framed against her need to be dropped.

PK Dogra, senior public prosecutor for the CBI, argued that Section 7 of the Prevention of Corruption Act talks about undue advantage. She took undue advantage of her position as she was not meant to effect a compromise between the parties and hand over the compromised amount to the parties through the police station and herself as has been pleaded by the accused. As a result, there was nothing favouring the accused in the CFSL report, and there was no merit in her application, which deserved dismissal.

After hearing the arguments, the court said as argued by the senior public prosecutor for the CBI, it was not the role of the accused to effect a compromise between the parties or to hand over the amount of compromise, if any, to the parties through herself. How and under what circumstances this was being done by the accused could be appreciated when the evidence is led by the prosecution. At this stage, no ground was made out to allow the application filed and the same is accordingly dismissed.

Jaswinder Kaur, former SHO of the Mani Majra police station, was booked by the CBI on June 29, 2020 for allegedly demanding Rs 5-lakh bribe from a Mani Majra resident, Gurdeep Singh, in lieu of not registering a cheating case against him.