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Journalism of Courage
MUMBAI, FEBRUARY 25: A division bench of the Bombay High Court today rejected the Aguiar Committee report in its totality calling it “biased” and ruled that the police encounter in which Sada Pawle and Vijay Tandel were killed on the afternoon of September 26, 1997 was genuine. Judge Aguiar, who was asked by the High Court to conduct a probe into the encounter killings of Jawed Fawda, Sada Pawle and Vijay Tandel, had indicted Mumbai police for staging encounters and had said that they had killed Sada Pawle and Vijay Tandel in cold blood.
While delivering its order for the fourth consecutive day today in a group of petitions accusing Mumbai police of staging encounters to eliminate gangsters, the division bench of Justice N Arumugham and Justice Ranjana Desai said Judge A S Aguiar should have conducted the inquiry “informally” and not like a “trial.”
Punching holes in the Aguiar Committee report the HC bench questioned why the judge had not summoned important witnesses like senior officers connected directly with encounters to depose before him. The court also objected to his over-reliance on the witness Baldev Singh, despite his (Baldev Singh) changing his version of the encounter thrice in the court. Baldev Singh had initially filed an affidavit along with Sada Pawle’s brother Anand, Anand’s wife Anita and sister Hausabai saying that they were all present in the car when Sada Pawle and Vijay Tandel were dragged out and shot by a police team led by Asst. Inspector Vijay Salaskar. However, later all four of them retracted their affidavits. While the three stuck to their retractions when they appeared before the court, Baldev changed his stand again andstuck to the contents of his first affidavit. The HC ruled the evidence given by Baldev Singh was totally false and that he was not present at all when the encounter took place. The high court today also issued a set of guidelines to police to be followed during encounters: n If the police gets a tip-off regarding the criminal movements of a gangster, a diary entry should be made. If a senior officer gets a tip-off, he should put it down in a separate diary.
