MP High Court’s blow to Lokayukta

Prashun Bhaumik |

The Jabalpur High Court has snubbed the state Lokayukta, upholding a Bhopal court order asking the police to investigate charges against him. 

By N D Sharma

The noose round the neck of Madhya Pradesh Lokayukta Ripusudan Dayal has tightened, with the state high court (at Jabalpur) refusing to interfere with the order of the Bhopal judicial magistrate who had directed the police to investigate the allegations of corruption and fraud against him. The single bench of the high court which passed the order was not impressed with the Lokayukta’s plea that there was a nexus between the magistrate and the complainants.

This is a serious blow to the authority and credibility of Dayal, who has served as chief justice of the Sikkim high court and then as a judge of the Supreme Court. Even otherwise, he has little to show by way of action to check corruption in high places in the state during the four years he has occupied this post.

Even though he described the Lokayukta’s allegation of nexus as ‘baseless and unfounded’, Justice Rakesh Saksena deemed it appropriate to transfer the case from the court of the magistrate to that of the Chief Judicial Magistrate (CJM), Bhopal, “in order to put the matter beyond the pale of slightest suspicion in the interest of justice”. The CJM may either “hear it himself or make it over to some other competent magistrate for proceeding according to law”, the eight-page order of the High Court says.

This puts the state in a peculiar situation. There is an FIR (registered on the directive of a special court) in a corruption case against chief minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan and his wife Sadhna Singh. Complaints of corruption against over a dozen ministers and several senior bureaucrats are pending before the Lokayukta. A Bhopal court has directed the police to inquire into the corruption and fraud charges against Lokayukta Dayal and his wife Usha Dayal. Now the Lokayukta has been literally snubbed by the state high court for trying to denigrate the Bhopal magistrate for performing his duty.

In a nutshell, the matter pertains to the purchase of a house in a posh locality by Dayal in his and his wife’s name for which the deed documents were allegedly tampered with at Dayal’s instance. Armed with the authenticated copies of the official records, journalist-turned-activist Alok Singhai and advocate Narendra Bhavsar lodged a complaint with the Director-General of Special Police Establishment (SPE), a wing of the Lokayukta organisation, and also approached the Economic Offences Wing (EOW) of the state police. Having failed to get an investigation started at the two places, they filed a complaint in the court of Judicial Magistrate First Class (JMFC) D K Singh in Bhopal under certain sections of the Indian Penal Code and the Prevention of Corruption Act.

The complaint was turned down by the JMFC on the ground that he was not competent to hear a case under the Prevention of Corruption Act. The complainants then deleted the sections of the Prevention of Corruption Act and filed in the same court another complaint against Dayal and his wife Usha under sections 420, 465, 467 and 471/3A of the Indian Penal Code. The court of D K Singh passed an order on June 19 under Section 156(3) of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC) directing the officer in-charge of the Koh-e-Fiza police station (in Bhopal) to register the First Information Report (FIR) if a cognisable offence was made out and file a report (in the court) on June 25. The Koh-e-Fiza police filed the report saying that no cognisable offence was made out. The Lokayukta had, meanwhile, filed a complaint in the same court against Singhai and Bhavsar accusing them of defaming him by making false allegations against him and his wife.

That was not all. The Deputy Secretary of the Lokayukta Organisation wrote a letter on the direction of the Lokayukta to the Registrar-General of the high court with a view to narrating the “real state of affairs of the case”. The high court received another letter purported to be signed by R Dayal but addressed to nobody. Chief Justice Patnaik treated the two missives from the Lokayukta as the revision petition and called the records from the court of D.K. Singh and assigned the case for hearing to the single bench of Rakesh Saksena. Both the letters have been taken on record by the high court.

The two letters stated that the investigations by the Director-General of SPE had found the allegations against the Lokayukta as false and that it was in the knowledge of Magistrate D K Singh. The letters also alleged a nexus between the magistrate and the complainants because D.K. Singh had first turned down their complaint for want of jurisdiction but later entertained it.

Justice Saksena deals with all the points raised by the Lokayukta. Quoting from the Supreme Court judgements, Justice Saksena says in his order: “It is well settled that the Magistrate has to proceed and pass the orders in a case on the basis of material on record of that particular case. He is not supposed to remember or pass the orders in a case on the basis of facts of any other case, much less on his personal memory”. The judge also says that the fact that the Director General of SPE had filed a case against the complainants describing their allegations against the Lokayukta and his wife as false and “actuated with malafides” did not debar the complainants from filing the complaint before the magistrate.

Significantly, the high court order notes: “Even if the first complaint filed by the complainants was returned by the Magistrate to the complainants on the grounds that he had no jurisdiction to entertain the same as commission of offence under section 13(1)(d) of the Prevention of Corruption Act was alleged, it did not debar the Magistrate to entertain the complaint again if these allegations were omitted by the complainants in the second complaint”.

On examining the order of Magistrate D K Singh, the documents and the record of the complaint, Justice Saksena was “of the view that no case for interference in the impugned order” was made out.