JOIN USEvidence? Well, the cops have stock witnesses
The fate of the Aryan Khan case has blown the lid off a common practice of law enforcement agencies: the use of fake, stock witnesses for the prosecution.
An old practice, it was even portrayed in the 1977 Amitabh Bachchan-Shashi Kapoor starrer Imaan Dharam, in which the protagonists hang around courts and are frequently hired to appear as witnesses and give evidence as coached.
Several such stock witnesses were reportedly used in the drugs case in which Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) officer Sameer Wankhede implicated film-star Shah Rukh Khan’s son Aryan Khan. One of them, Adil Fazal Usmani, had been used by the agency in at least five cases since just 2020.
Whenever it makes a raid or a drug seizure, the NCB has to prepare a ‘panchanama’ that provides details of the scene on the spot as supporting evidence in the case.
It has to be prepared in front of independent witnesses, the ‘pancha’, to corroborate the police version.
The NCB is reported to have used at least four ‘pancha’ witnesses multiple times before the Aryan case: Shehbaz Mansuri in four cases; two others, Sayyad Zubair Ahmed and Abdul Rehman Ibrahim, in two cases each just this year.
Another NCB witness is Fletcher Patel. Patel claimed to be an Army veteran and a public-spirited citizen only too glad to help government agencies. That does not explain how he happened to be simply passing by wherever the NCB was conducting a raid. It’s like making a profession of “passing by”, whether Juhu or Colaba, Andheri or the Gateway of India.
Law enforcement officers throw up their hands. “What can we do? People don’t come forward to tell us what they have seen for themselves. The ordinary citizen doesn’t want to get involved in police or court proceedings. We have to catch hold of people we can, and use them,” said a senior police officer who has served with the NCB. Besides, who would accompany a police party in raids against the drug mafia, especially when it happens at odd hours, he asked.
The NDPS (Narcotics Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act) cases often see acquittals because courts take a dim view of the evidence provided by stock witnesses, treating them as “compromised” or under police influence.
The NDPS Act is a strong law prescribing stringent punishment. While it prescribes very severe punishment for offenders, it also has safeguards to minimise the chances of some innocent person being falsely incriminated. The seizure of drugs has to be done in the presence of a gazetted officer or a magistrate, and the accused is given an opportunity to search the cops so that they don’t plant drugs on him.
Sometimes, the investigating officer does all this only on paper, without actually following procedure. These cases, where a person or magistrate is shown to be present on paper but wasn’t there at the time of seizure, often fall during the trial stage when cross-examination of witnesses brings out inconsistencies in the prosecution’s case.
In other criminal cases, the police sometimes rely on stock witnesses, and the same lot of witnesses keep deposing in different cases. As one police officer said, “This is because the ordinary citizen does not want to get involved in the legal hassles. When actual witnesses shy away from deposing, the police find others.”
“Why only witnesses to a crime? An ordinary person doesn’t come to us to lodge a case or a complaint unless the matter is really serious. Otherwise, people avoid going to the police and getting embroiled in court cases which become an ordeal for them,” he added.
Thus, the same person may be a witness in a road accident in Dadra one day, another near Church Gate on another day, and of a theft or burglary in Bandra on yet another day. “We have no choice,” plead the cops.
Mind you, that’s the way things are if the cops are straight. But if there is a mala fide intention to implicate somebody, a false case can be cooked up, evidence planted, fake witnesses put up, and a person put behind bars. Even if (s)he is finally acquitted, the period spent behind bars, the legal hassles and expenses, the loss of reputation and job/occupation, and the trauma of the case itself is a punishment for inviting the wrath of the powers-that-be.
There have been cases in which men jailed on terrorism charges were acquitted and released after spending 18 or 23 years of their lives behind bars. And no, they are not compensated for their sufferings and losses. One is hearing about it in the media only for Aryan Khan.
(The writer is a freelance journalist)