Less-used law arraigns ex-President kin

MUMBAI: To add former President Pratibha Patil’s brother as an accused in a murder case despite the CBI exonerating him, the local sessions court relied on a rarely used provision meant to ensure fairness in criminal proceedings.
More than a decade after V G Patil, then chief of Jalgaon Congress committee, was shot dead by two alleged hired goons, the trial court arraigned the ex-President’s brother G N Patil and former Congress MP Ulhas Patil on charges of criminal conspiracy and murder.The court has used section 319 of the CrPC under which, it can try a person, who was originally not named an accused or chargesheeted, if it finds evidence against him or her later.
The victim’s widow, Rajani, claimed there were two intermediaries who gave the “supari” at the behest of G N Patil and Ulhas. She moved the Bombay HC in July 2007 for a proper probe by the CBI to implicate the “real masterminds”. But the CBI gave the two politicians a clean chit, saying they had found no evidence.
Calling the CBI probe faulty, Rajani’s counsel Mahesh Jethmalani demanded to know whose decision it was to absolve the two. Two years later, then HC bench of Chief Justice Swatanter Kumar and Justice D Y Chandrachud said it was unable to hold that the CBI probe was faulty and rejected Rajani’s plea to add G N Patil or Ulhas as accused. The trial had been stayed since 2007.
Rajani contended in the HC that she had “swathes of evidence”, including a CD, eye-witness accounts, signed statements by a shooter before a magistrate, mobile records showing calls including conference calls among G N Patil, Ulhas and an alleged intermediary for a month before the murder, on the eve of the murder and within two hours of the murder and documents showing the political rivalry. Convinced, the trial court named the two as accused.
Former HC judge B H Marlapalle on Tuesday said the sessions court order to proceed in a fresh trial against the Patils was the “rare use” of a “little known but crucial section 319 of CrPC, meant to ensure truth emerges in criminal cases...” The section says even during trial, if it appears to the judge that the evidence suggests involvement of other people, s/he can add them as accused. “The judge can even order their arrests,” said Marlapalle. Jethmalani on Tuesday said he commended Rajani’s “tenacity”.