EMPEROR Vs. RUSTAM CURSETJI LAM

JUDGEMENT

(1.) These are two applications in revision against two convictions passed by the Presidency Magistrate, fourth Court. In application No. 243 Dr. Lam was charged with keeping a common gaming house and thereby committing an offence punishable under Section 4(a) of Bombay Act IV of 1887, and in the other case four persons who were in Dr. Lam's premises were charged with being found in a common gaming house and thereby committing offences under Section 5 of the said Act.

(2.) Now the evidence is of two kinds. In the first place there is the evidence of a witness named Chand Gulab who says that he was given by the police a marked five rupee note and five marked rupee coins and that he went with that money to Dr. Lam's room and there made certain bets and that Dr. Lam took the marked money for the purposes of the bets, The learned Magistrate says that Chand Gulab is a reliable witness, and he accepts his story. But the difficulty I have in accepting the story is that as soon as he left Dr. Lam's premises he informed the police of the bets there made, and the police at once raided Dr. Lam's premises. It is quite clear from the evidence of Sergeant Taylor, who was the police-officer in charge, that Dr. Lam and the other accused persons who were in Dr. Lam's premises were not anticipating a raid. Although no raid was expected the marked money was not found on the premises, and the conclusion I draw from that is that Chand Gulab did not effect bets with the ten rupees; if he had, they would certainly have been recovered when the police raided the premises a few minutes afterwards. On his own showing Chand Gulab is not a person with a very high sense of honour, because he says that he had made bets previously with Dr. Lam (which Dr. Lam denies), although for the last two years he had been a member of the Anti- Gambling League. He probably thought that he could find a better use for the Rs. 10 which he had been lucky enough to obtain from police than handing them over to Dr. Lam for the police to recover. That is the only direct evidence of any betting. The other evidence is the result of the police raid.

(3.) There were discovered in the premises of Dr. Lam various slips of paper on some of which were names said to be names of horses and on some certain sums of money were marked. The document on which the learned Government Pleader relies most strongly is Ex. G, which has the names of ten horses which were running at the Bombay races on that day, the day of the raid, and against the names of some of those horses in two columns of the slip headed respectively " W" and " P " were sums of Re. 1-4-0, from which I think one may infer that bets of Re. 1-4-0 had been made or were to be made on certain horses for a Win or a Place. But no betting books of any sort were found. The suggestion apparently is that Dr. Lam was carrying on a book-maker's business. If so, one would expect to find books with records of the bets made. The slips of paper which were found appear to me to be consistent with the view that Dr. Lam was interested in horse racing, as he says, and was making a note of bets which he proposed to make at the races, possibly for himself and his friends as well. But I see absolutely no evidence of anything in the nature of a betting business or of a book-maker's business being carried on by Dr. Lam or by the other accused who were in his rooms.