RAMESH SEHGAL Vs. STATE OF HARYANA

JUDGEMENT

(1.) Petitioner, a senior police officer, presently posted as Director General Prisons. Haryana, has approached this Court for grant of bail in a case registered under Sections 7 & 13 of the Prevention of Corruption Act. 1988.

(2.) As per the case of the petitioner a false and frivolous case has been registered at the behest of a senior functionary of the police department Shri V.N. Negi, who had been nursing vendetta against him since the petitioner was appointed as Director General of Police. A perusal of the first information report lodged by one Shri Surinder Singh is per se a fabricated document with the sole aim to defame the petitioner and to lower him in the eyes of his colleagues as well as the public. The story as set up in the first information report is that one Surinder Singh, a person dealing in export of cloth approached him for extension of parole of his friend Gurpreet Singh, who was undergoing a life imprisonment for 20 years. According to Surinder Singh the petitioner is alleged to have asked him to contact at Delhi and thereafter a sum of Rs. 1 lac was stated to have been demanded for a favour to extend the parole of Gurpreet Singh for another five weeks. Whole deal was struck off at Hilton Hotel for an amount of Rs. 50.000/-. Since Surinder Singh did not give this bribe of Rs. 50,000/- to the petitioner he approached the police department to take appropriate action in the matter i.e. he be caught redhanded. It is in this background that the alleged trap was laid down and the money is stated to have been recovered in a brief case opened at the instance of the petitioner.

(3.) According to the learned counsel for the petitioner the version as given in the first information report per se appears to be a cooked-up story. It is quite unthinkable that a person of the rank of a Director General of Police would ever agree to meet Gurpreet Singh, a life prisoner, and that too at the behest of one Surinder Singh, with whom the petitioner had no link whatsoever. So, the story set up by the prosecution that the petitioner agreed to extend the period of parole subject to their paying a sum of Rs. 50.000/ -is too crude to be believed. Otherwise too, even the later part of the story set up that the petitioner while in judicial custody escaped and got himself admitted in P.G.I. is quite strange to be believed especially when the petitioner was under surveillance while he was being treated for his heart ailment in Government Hospital at Panchkula. Besides it, as has been found by the Doctors, the petitioner was a patient of unstable angina and precisely for this reason was referred to the P.G.I. for complete examination. Doctors at P.G.I. after having examined the petitioner have come to the conclusion that he needs to be continued with the treatment proposed as well as to report for periodic follow-up for further treatment.