Complainant or culprit?

A RECENT reference to the mounting pendency of court cases refreshed my memory of an episode which had occurred over two decades back during my career in the banking sector.

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I was the manager of the loans section. A loan for the purchase of a photostat machine was sanctioned to a young man under the Prime Minister’s Rozgar Yojana. A couple of weeks after the loan amount had been disbursed, I went to the borrower’s booth for routine inspection of the machine. To my discomfiture, neither the borrower nor the machine was found at the site. Inquiries made on the spot revealed that the machine which was hypothecated to the bank had been disposed of. The signs were indicative of wilful default.

As unilateral disposal of a hypothecated asset was an offence, we mulled taking legal action against the borrower. The bank’s lawyer was consulted; he counselled us to file a criminal complaint in a court as opposed to lodging an FIR. Subsequently, the branch manager filed a criminal complaint in the court. I was listed as a witness.

The court fixed the first date of hearing. The complainant branch manager received mandatory summons to be present for the proceedings. Accompanying my boss, we reached the court in time on the first date of hearing. As soon as our case came up, the hearing was adjourned because the summons had remained unserved on the defendant as he was not found at his address. The borrower would have evaded the summons, we suspected. An order was passed for issuing the summons again for the next date. The lawyer told us that the complainants had to be present in the court on every date.

The motions of the first date were reprised on the second date also. The accused remained elusive. The case was adjourned for the next date with ditto orders. Without missing any date, I accompanied my boss to the court five-six times. Every time, the hearing was adjourned on the same ground of ‘summons not serviced’. Exasperated, my boss wondered whether he was the complainant or the culprit.

As the stalemate lingered on, I was routinely transferred out from the station. The mantle of accompanying the branch manager for attending court hearings fell on the shoulders of my successor. After moving on and getting occupied with new assignments, I lost track of the case. With the passage of time, I have retired from service but was never called to depose in the case. I hope the case was taken to its logical conclusion. Or does it lie buried in the proverbial pendency?