NEW DELHI, 23 August 2007 — The Delhi High Court yesterday overturned the conviction and life sentence of a former Indian Cabinet minister and four others in a murder case, saying the evidence used to convict them was flawed, lawyers said.
The court found that India’s Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) had “miserably failed” to prove its case and set aside the guilty verdict.
Shibu Soren, 63, was the highest ranking politician convicted of such serious charges and his sentence had been seen as a strong message in a country where regional politics are often dominated by strongmen with no qualms about using corruption and violence to further their goals. Soren served as federal Coal Minister until his conviction last year by a lower court for kidnapping and conspiring to kill his private secretary, Shashi Nath Jha. He had been sentenced to life in prison and fined 500,000 rupees ($11,245; euro8,440).
He resigned from the Cabinet and Parliament and appealed the trial court’s decision.
According to the charges, Jha was abducted on May 22, 1994, from a New Delhi neighborhood and later murdered in a residential neighborhood in the eastern city of Ranchi, where Soren is from and the capital of Jharkhand state.
Soren reportedly Jha killed because he was about to reveal details of a bribe received by Soren to support a minority government in 1993. The body was reportedly buried in a nearby forest.
Yesterday, Justices R. S. Sodhi and H. R. Malhotra accepted Soren’s appeal, saying that police had failed to prove that a skeleton recovered four years after Jha’s disappearance was his, said Dinesh Mathur, Soren’s primary lawyer.
“The court has held that police have miserably failed to prove the case,” Mathur told reporters outside the court.
“Soren was wrongly sentenced.”
Soren’s lawyer hailed the verdict and said he expected his client, currently in jail in Jharkhand, to be released in a day or two.
But Jha’s relatives said they would appeal to the Supreme Court.
“What can I say,” his daughter Preeti Jha told NDTV news channel. “I am very unsatisfied with today’s decision. He has been acquitted even when he committed the murder and was jailed for life. We will not let him go — we will do everything we can.” Soren would re-enter politics, said his son, Hemant Soren.
Soren is from the eastern state of Jharkhand where his people, the impoverished indigenous forest-dwelling tribes people known as Adivasis, occupy the lowest rungs of India’s complex social ladder.
He rose to power championing the rights of this oppressed minority, making his name in the 1960s by leading a campaign to keep mining companies from tearing down forests to build coal mines and free his fellow tribes people from landlords and moneylenders. He has also been indicted for his alleged role in the 1975 mob killings of 11 people in a Muslim village. Charges were filed two years ago, but the trial has not begun.
Last year’s life term for the 62-year-old tribal leader had been greeted by some political analysts as a welcome change in crime-ridden Indian politics.
India has become notorious for lawless politicians, particularly since a Supreme Court judgment in 2003 required them to disclose criminal records.
A study by an Indian watchdog after the disclosure rule was put in place found that nearly a quarter of the more than 540 people elected to parliament in 2004 had faced criminal charges, including murder and rape.
