Drug peddlers slip via legal loophole as police watch in vain

BENGALURU: For the alleged cocaine and hashish peddler the police caught on Sunday, the next few years will be a period of slight inconvenience.
He will be in jail a couple of months, get bail, get dragged to court the next 4-5 years and then be acquitted because the police couldn't follow a procedure laid down in a 31-year-old law.

The problem is this: When the police conduct a raid to nab a drug peddler, they have to take along residents from the area to witness the arrest. Without such eyewitnesses, known as 'panchanamas' locally , any case against an alleged drug peddler is likely to fall flat in court under the stringent stipulations of the Narcotic Durgs and Psychotropic Substances Act, 1985.

"The main reason for the acquittals are the panchanamas," said a senior officer in the Central Crime Branch's Women and Narcotics Wing in Bengaluru. "We have to take along residents and neighbours while conducting raids. The interrogation should be made in front of them. They are the eye witnesses in the case. But when the case comes to court they turn hostile fearing threats."

If the drug peddler is a woman, a well-regarded woman resident from the neighbourhood has to accompany the police during the raid. It's tough to get residents to tag along if the raids are conducted at night. Bengaluru's narcotics police expect all this will exonerate their terrible track record of zero convictions between April 2014 and June 30 this year despite the arrests of 171 people for allegedly storing and distributing narcotic drugs. That's about one arrest every 4.5 days, an indicator of the huge problem of substance abuse in the city.

In the past two years, Bengaluru police have seized 6,878 kg of marijuana (ganja), 7 kg of cocaine, 4 kg of brown sugar, 3 kg of hashish and 800 kg of other narcotic drugs such as charas.

Thirty alleged drug peddlers convicted by lower courts were acquitted by the High Court in the past two years primarily because the police had not been able to follow the procedure as laid down in the Act or as some witnesses backtracked, according to state public prosecutor P M Nawaz.

Police said they followed all procedures in the raid on Sunday when the Special Investigation Wing of the Central Crime Branch in Bengaluru arrested a drug peddler with 621 grams of cocaine and 265 grams of hashish.

Senior criminal advocate MT Nanaiah, who has represented alleged drug peddlers in four cases this year, said the rules of NDPS Act are cumbersome and tough to follow. "It is the same problem in the entire country and convictions are very rare in narcotic drugs arrests," he said. "The police kill 50 per cent of the cases and the public prosecutors the other half."

The police department has now come up with an ingenious plan to overcome the problem of unreliable eyewitnesses: Take along government employees as panchanamas hoping they will be less likely to turn hostile.

The police will write to the revenue department to depute two employees who can be engaged as eyewitnesses, the senior police officer quoted above said. This is already in practice, although unofficially .

"We are trying to watertight the narcotics cases," said Sharath Chandra, joint commissioner of police (crime). "We are taking government officials in some cases and when they are not available we are taking citizens as panchanamas."