Corrupt cops who refuse to register FIRs with the help of inept assistant prosecutors make a deadly criminal cocktail in Goa…

By Dr Olav Albuquerque

A FRESH travel advisory issued by the Canadian government has advised its nationals, especially women, that they are not safe in the national capital regions of Delhi and, hold your breath, sussegad Goa where Goans are more used to fun, frolic and feni than ogling women. Of course, the Goa Police have clarified there have been no crimes against women this year. But the Goa Police is notorious for downplaying crime and not registering FIRs in cognizable crimes, despite the Supreme Court declaring that FIRs must be registered.
In property cheating cases, the police will try to convince you that the crime is a civil dispute where they have no jurisdiction. They do this simply because they do not want to register a crime, which means they will have to investigate and charge-sheet the criminal within 60 days if he has been arrested.
If he has not been arrested, as in the case of the Scarlett Keeling rape-and-murder case, they can always botch up the crime and get away with it.
The police sub-inspector who was suspended from the police force for registering the 15-year-old girl’s death as a case of accidental death not only returned to the police force but got promoted as DySP and was embroiled in another controversy for assaulting a man who jumped a red light.
You will be lucky if your complaint is registered as an FIR, failing which you are entitled to meet superior police officers like the DySP, the SP who is in-charge of the district and finally go right up to the IGP who only has the power to order his subordinate who is an SP, to direct the PI to investigate. Even if the IGP refuses to help you, then the only choice is to file a complaint under section 156 (3) of the Criminal Procedure Code before a magistrate who will order the police to investigate and file a report to the court.

NO END TO ORDEAL
AFTER the report known as a charge-sheet is filed, your ordeal may start all over again. This is where the government advocates, known as assistant public prosecutors (APPs) take over the case. They sit in small rooms within the court premises and never visit the police stations to follow up on the defective charge-sheets filed in the courts. “Visiting police stations is not our job,” two APPs laconically told this correspondent.
They are right. These APPs are promoted to the post of public prosecutors on seniority basis although they may have just one or two convictions to their credit. As long as there is no evaluation of how many convictions they have obtained, there is no incentive to bring about convictions. All they have to do is to bring the facts to the notice of the court and leave it to the court to acquit the accused, which more often than not, does occur.
I have met between 40 and 50 APPs in the states of Goa and Maharashtra. I am the complainant in three criminal cases, one of which is pending before the Mapusa judicial magistrate for over 10 years without the charges being framed because the then APP, whom I will refer to as Mr A wanted to meet his fiance in the evenings and was least bothered about studying the case.
This Mr A was rude, uncooperative and refused to interact with this complainant on the ground that he was busy. When asked about the progress of the case, he rudely replied, “You will be told!” and slammed down the phone. I later learnt he was unable to rebut the discharge applications for two of the three accused who were discharged by a magistrate, who had been elevated to the Sessions Court and later reverted to his earlier post of magistrate.
When I asked him to recommend my complaint for revision, he rudely refused and smashed the wash room door in my face. I was forced to approach his superior, the then Director of Prosecutions Shiral Monteiro, who heard me out for two hours, recommended the patently wrong discharge order for revision, where the case was taken over by the excellent senior Public Prosecutor Anuradha Talaulikar, who allowed me to assist her and address the court of Sessions Judge PV Sawaikar to restore my criminal complaint to the file of the same magistrate who had been elevated to the sessions court and reverted as a magistrate.
The same APP now consulted his superior, Shiral Monteiro, who told him to recuse (=excuse himself) from the case. This delinquent APP did not know how to draft an application and send it to the then chief judicial magistrate, Pooja Kawlekar, who rejected it saying there was no provision under the CrPC for an APP to recuse from a case. She said this APP had to approach his direct superior, the director of prosecutions (DoP) with a request to recuse from the case.
The new DoP asked me : “Who is she (the chief CJM) to tell me how to run my department?” and sat upon the request to remove Mr A from my restored criminal complaint until I approached the office of the chief minister to remove this allegedly delinquent APP. This was the second complaint against this APP who was earlier accused of delaying the trial of a Catholic priest accused of molesting a minor girl, whom he had called to his room to hear her confession.
This director of prosecutions lied under the Right to Information (RTI) Act to the Goa government that there was no earlier complaint against this allegedly delinquent APP. She was technically right because the activist-lawyer had lodged the complaint with the court and not the director of prosecutions. But she was well aware of this fact. She not only lied under the RTI Act but held an allegedly sham inquiry into my complaint without inviting me to depose before her and promoted this allegedly delinquent APP to the post of public prosecutor where he draws a salary of over Rs 1,00,000 per month after irrevocably destroying my case.
Today, I am saddled with another APP in Margao who like Mr A, is continuously busy 24 x 7 with a huge mountain of files before him. He refuses to interact with me over the phone, refuses to give his email id, and has met me on just three occasions to discuss how I should prepare for my examination-in-chief and cross examination. Out of these, just two have been fruitful. He refuses to interact even on a WhatsApp call which is free. His only mode of communication with me is by immediately replying to WhatsApp messages. Two mistakes have crept into my examination-in-chief but he has refused to acknowledge my WhatsApp messages.

LUCK PLAYS A ROLE!
SO, there you have it. You will be lucky to get a good APP who will be promoted as PP if there is no vigilance probe against him or her. The present Director of Prosecutions Poonam Bharne is cordial, competent and congenial. Like Shiral Monteiro and Anuradha Talaulikar. But there is little she can do to rigidly control all the APPs under her, most of whom have not been selected by her in the first place.
The system of selecting and promoting APPs to PPs needs to be overhauled.