Refuting the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) accusation that actress Rhea Chakraborty, along with her brother Showik, “financed” the drug purchases of her boyfriend and late actor Sushant Singh Rajput, her lawyer Satish Maneshinde told the court Upper Bombay (HC) on Tuesday. that “Rajput had no shortage of funds.”
Chakraborty and his brother were arrested on September 9 in connection with the alleged drug angle in the Rajput death. Judge Sarang Kotwal reserved order on all requests.
Arguing for his bail, Maneshinde said: “The Rajput house manager Samuel Miranda used to take care of all the household expenses, and there was no question that Rhea financed the drug purchases for the deceased actor.”
Responding to NCB’s allegation that Chakraborty was part of a drug syndicate, Maneshinde said the allegations were based simply on a solitary incident on March 17, when he gave his credit card to Miranda, who withdrew 10,000 rupees using it and bought contraband for the deceased actor. She maintained that no amount was paid directly with the Chakraborty card to any of the alleged street vendors for acquiring drugs, so it cannot be said that she is associated with any drug ring.
It is an admitted fact that the Rajput used to use drugs even before Chakraborty met him in April 2019, and two of the Rajput co-stars, Sara Ali Khan and Shraddha Kapoor, reportedly told NCB that they had been using drugs for a long time, according to the reports. He said.
Maneshinde said Showik was also accused of being part of a drug syndicate for allegedly paying negligible amounts three times in April for buying miniscule amounts of ganja and charas.
The lawyer added that even if one were to heed the accusations made by NCB, the strict provisions contained in section 27A of the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act of 1985 (financing of illicit drug trafficking or harboring criminals) did not apply to Chakraborty or Showik.
Maneshinde said that NCB’s reliance on recovering the commercial amount of drugs from an Anuj Keshwani and then the claim that Chakraborty and Showik were part of a drug ring cannot be sustained as neither of them had any connection to the alleged drug supplier.
NCB had further alleged that Chakraborty had harbored Rajputs, who used to use drugs. Maneshinde argued that during the relevant period, Chakraborty was residing with the Rajput in his home and questioned how he could have hosted the late actor in his own home.
Lawyer Taraq Sayed, who requested bail for another defendant, Abdel Basit Parihar, claimed that NCB has claimed to have dismantled a major drug trafficking ring by arresting between 18 and 19 college students. He claimed that nearly all of the defendants arrested by NCB in this case come from well-to-do families and cannot be called drug dealers or suppliers.
Sayed maintained that the arrests were made solely on the basis of statements recorded in section 67 of the NDPS Act, especially when there was little recovery of most of them. He said statements under section 67 can be used at most to corroborate a defendant’s recovery, and not otherwise.
Sayed said that Parihar is a senior architecture student and missed the exam because he was arrested by NCB. He added that although a moralistic argument is being advanced on behalf of NCB about how society, especially the young generation, was affected by the threat of narcotics, in our country more people die from smoking than from drug abuse.
Maintaining that all the alleged transactions involved small amounts of drugs and were therefore bail, Sayed said that the five applicants before HC – Chakraborty, Showik, Miranda, Dipesh Sawant and Parihar, a member of the Rajput staff, were entitled to a surety as a matter of law.
In support of his claim that the alleged offenses are bail, he relied on a 2010 Mumbai High Court ruling that all NDPS offenses involving small amounts were bail.
However, Additional Attorney General Anil Singh, who objected to the bail requests on behalf of NCB, alleged that the applicants wrongly assumed that all NDPS offenses involving small amounts of drugs were subject to bail. Singh argued that the NDPS Act nowhere makes certain offenses liable to bail and asserted that all offenses under the Act were not.
Judge Kotwal agreed with his submission. The judge pointed to a 1999 ruling of a constitutional court of the Supreme Court, noting that all the crimes contemplated in the NDPS Act could not be subject to bail and, therefore, no other court was authorized to adopt a different opinion on the question.
Singh added that so far 19 people have been arrested by NCB in this case, and they were all interconnected and interconnected. Referring to Anuj Keshwani’s recovery of the commercial amount of drugs, he said that the case of none of them can be separated from that of the others.
“Drug trafficking was a regular business of the drug union,” Singh said. “Showik was in regular contact with the distributors. Sushant Singh Rajput, the drug user, may not be alive today, but the people involved in these deals cannot go free just because he no longer exists. ”
Singh also responded to Maneshinde’s claim that NCB had no jurisdiction to investigate the case in light of the Supreme Court’s August 19, 2020 order to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to take over the cases “on the death of Rajput and the surrounding circumstances ”.
Maneshinde had submitted that in NCB’s responses to Chakraborty and Showik’s bail requests to the NDPS special court, NCB had clearly stated that it was a consequence of the drugs angle in the Rajput case. “This case has nothing to do with the death of Sushant Singh Rajput,” Singh said. “It is not the case of anyone that Sushant Singh Rajput died due to drug abuse.”
The additional attorney general added that the case related to the Rajput only to the extent that he was a drug user, and not otherwise. Furthermore, it is an established position of law that a defendant cannot choose the agency to investigate crimes against him, he said. Chakraborty does not have this argument that the case should have been turned over to CBI for investigation, he said.
Chakraborty and Showik applied to HC for bail after the NDPS special court rejected their bail requests on September 11. The other three defendants have addressed the court separately after the special court denied them bail.
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