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Revision as of 13:20, 7 October 2006 by Mukerjee (talk | contribs)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)Manu Sharma (b. 1977) is widely believed to have murdered Indian model and documentary filmmaker Jessica Lal in a crowded bar early in the morning of April 29, 1999. Despite dozens of witnesses, Sharma was acquitted of all charges, along with seven other well-connected defendants by judge S.L. Bhayana on February 21, 2006.
Sharma is the son of leading Haryana politician Venod Sharma of the Indian Congress Party. Venod Sharma has was a minister in the central Narasimha Rao cabinet, and at the time of the crime, was Power minister for the state of Haryana. The family is related to ex-president Shankar Dayal Sharma and owns a number of sugar mills and entertainment businesses in Punjab, Haryana and Chandigarh.
The murder
Seven days after the murder, Manu confessed to the police, giving this reason for the murder:
- "The idea was generally to shoot her because it was so embarrassing that she said that even if you give me Rs 1000, you will not get even a sip of my drink. So I thought I will just shoot somebody. I pointed towards her a little and fired."
A number of eye witnesses made initial statements that corroborated with this confession. A consistent story emerged: Jessical Lal had rebuffed Manu's request for a drink. A powerful politician's son, Manu was unaccustomed to being denied. So he brought out his 0.22 pistol from his pocket, and fired one shot into the air, and the second straight at Jessica's head, killing her in an instant.
However, all these statements, as well as Manu's own confession, were later retracted in court, or were thrown out due to procedural reasons.
Media Pressure
The acquittal was particularly noteworthy because the murder had been committed in the presence of dozens of people at the bar of the Tamarind Court Cafe restaurant in Delhi. Most of the witnesses who had originally claimed to have seen Manu Sharma shoot Jessica turned hostile during the protracted court case, and it appears likely that the forensic evidence related to the spent shells was doctored by the police, since two cartridges sent for testing turned out to have been fired from different guns. In view of the fact that the weapon was never recovered, other police officers themselves questioned as to why the bullets were at all sent for testing.
Not many people in Chandigarh are surprised at the acquittal of this allegedly high profile criminal. Till a few days before the judgement, 29-year-old Manu was seen attending parties in the town, and running his popular disco-cum-pub, Blue Ice, in Chandigarh’s posh Sector 17 market. He has a reputation for throwing well-organised parties in and around the town.
The Sharma family is known for manipulating and ‘managing’ things, a claim backed by reports of Manu getting into several brawls in recent years, with the family intervening in each instance to prevent any case from being registered. A Congress councillor in Chandigarh said that a compromise would be worked out in most cases. Soon after he was released on bail in 2003, there was a fight between employees of Blue Ice and some customers; Manu too was reportedly involved, but eventually, he was taken out of the case and the disco’s manager was booked instead.
Cover-Up
Sharma's acquittal caused widespread outrage in India with calls to the President, Abdul Kalam, for the case to be reopened, since it appeared to be a clear case of brazen misuse of power and influence by persons in high places. Even in the venal atmosphere of the criminal justice system in India where the art of buying/ intimidating/ cajoling witnesses and bribing investigating policemen is well known, the circumstances are by many deemed too shocking. Very few dared to come forward to depose. The few who did eventually turned hostile. The eyewitnesses who turned hostile include Shayan Munshi, Karan Rajput and Shivdas Yadav, who were all present at the site of the incident when Manu Sharma alledgedly shot Jessica Lal.
Increasingly, revelations in the media have been piecing together the story of the pressure, bribery and coercion that led to this reversal. In July-September 2006, the magazine Tehelka carried out a three month long sting operation against these three key witnesses, which was aired in a leading Hindi News channel, leading to increasing furore.
One of the key witnesses was Karan Rajput, who was present at the restaurant to borrow money from his nephew, Jitendra, the manager at the bar. Rajput who had long been an alcoholic, was asked by his nephew to sit at a chair which happened to be facing the bar where Shayan and Jessica were making drinks. After the murder, Karan initially claimed that he had witnessed how a boy in a white T-shirt came up to the bar and shot Jessica. However, in the court testimony, he turned hostile, denying that he had been there at all.
After the incident Karan Rajput lived a life of parties and drinking bouts - although he had no visible means of income. In January 2006, he died of cirrhosis of the liver. The Tehelka expose revealed that Karan Rajput was a regular visitor to Venod Sharma's office in Okhla, Delhi where he would collect money. Friends and drinking buddies who would go with him mention a total figure between Rs. 20 Lakhs and Rs. 35 lakhs. At the salary of Rs. 10,000 p.m., this is more than twenty year's wages.
Similarly, the electrician Shiv Das had also been standing behind the bar when the murder occurred. In his initial statement, subsequently retracted, he too had witnessed the murder. Recently, when a journalist from Tehelka called the electrician posing to be Jessica Lal's grieving sister, Shiv Das said openly that his initial confession, and that of the others, were all true.
Another witness, Shayan Munshi, who was serving behind the bar with Jessica, had signed an affidavit with the police witnessing the murder. However, in court he said that he did not know Hindi and could not tell what he had signed - and then he changed the story entirely. Subsequently it turned out that he had acted in a number of hindi-speaking films. When a reporter posing as a casting director for a foreign film venture approached him, he was very candid about knowing Hindi well.:
- Munshi : There is a minor difference between grammar of Hindi and Bengali. Like in Hindi word `car’ is feminine gender while in Bengali it’s neutral gender.
Shayan was also recently detained while trying to leave the country illegally.
The courts have taken up the case again, but it is not clear where it will go now.
Venod Sharma Resigns
On October 6, 2006, Venod Sharma, under increasing pressure in parliament for having shielded his son, especially after the Tehelka expose, resigned from the Congress ministry in Haryana.
References
- ^ "Jessica case: Venod Sharma quits Haryana ministry". NDTV. 2006-10-06. Retrieved 2006-10-07.
- ^ "English Translation of the transcript of the news expose "Case Ke Kaatil", produced by Tehelka, and aired on Star News". Star News/Tehelka. 2006-09-26. Retrieved 2006-10-07.
- Vineet Khare and Harinder Baweja. "Killers of Justice". Retrieved 2006-10-06.
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