Nearly 8 years of trying to weaken the case against Gopal Kanda

Delhi court has finally ordered prosecution evidence in air hostess case to be heard from Nov 27

NEW DELHI: While all hell broke loose when Gopal Goyal Kanda, the recently elected MLA from Haryana's Sirsa, was implicated in the 2012 suicide of a 23-year-old woman in Delhi, the former minister in the Bhupinder Singh Hooda government has more than just one skeleton in the closet. As the Delhi Police registered a case against the politician based on suicide notes recovered from Geetika Sharma, the air hostess who hanged herself, Kanda's involvement in several economic offences and corruption cases started surfacing in the coming years.

In 2016, when the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) had unearthed the mother of all Ponzi schemes and arrested Nirmal Singh Bhangoo, promoter of the Pearls Group for running a collective investment scheme running into more than Rs 50,000 crore, it was revealed that among several politicians who had benefitted from Bhangoo's outfit, one was Kanda.

CBI officials had at the time revealed that Kanda had received over Rs 100 crore in payments from Bhangoo, supposedly shown on paper as payments for the purchase of a Delhi farmhouse and some

land on the Delhi-gurugram border. Moreover, the newlyminted Sirsa MLA has also been booked by Delhi Police's Economic Offences Wing (EOW) in a cheating case related to one of his companies.

Despite Kanda's colourful history, the case that keeps bringing his name back into the

limelight is Geetika Sharma's suicide. The troubling story of the 23-year-old began when she was offered a job as an air hostess with his now-defunct MDLR Airlines. After working there for a while, she moved to Dubai, but Kanda kept harassing her to the extent of emailing false allegations about her professional abilities to her employers there so that he could force her to come back and work at his airlines.

In her suicide note, Geetika named Kanda and his continued abuse as the prime reason for taking her own life. And sixmonths after Geetika's suicide, her mother Anuradha Sharma (62) hanged herself, terrified of being persecuted from Kanda and his men.

The Delhi Police had arrested Kanda in the suicide case when Neeraj Kumar was Commissioner and P Karunakaran was Deputy Commissioner of Police (North-west) and remained in jail for a year-and-a-half. However, the rape charge against him was dropped by the Delhi High Court in 2014, after which he was granted bail.

But the nearly eight-yearold case, where a chargesheet had been filed, has not yet seen much progress, with the trial court yet to even finish recording of the prosecution's evidence in the case. But the slow pace is not owing to the lack of witnesses or evidence in the case.

In fact, when the Delhi Police had filed a cancellation report in the case in March this year, the court had strongly reprimanded the prosecution's

lack of interest in bringing the highly controversial case to its

logical end.

The judge had at the time rapped the initial Investigation Officer (IO), Jawahar Singh for filing the report, saying that he was "deliberately trying to dilute the case". Moreover, Singh had told the court that he was filing cancellation because statements of the complainant, his son, and another relative had somehow become completely untraceable. While the court had directed the concerned departments to take strict action against Singh, he retired from service at the rank of Assistant Commissioner of Police.

Furthermore, the delay from prosecution's side and complete lack of enthusiasm in pursuing the case is evident from court documents, that show that the Special Public Prosecutor, Rajiv Mohan was continually absent in court from September 23, with witnesses who had arrived in court to give evidence being dismissed without being examined at all.

In an October 11 order, the Special Judge Ajay Kumar Kuhar had noted that the Director of Prosecution had removed Mohan and assigned the case to Additional Public Prosecutor Manish Rawat, after its earlier remarks expressing deep objection with Mohan's absence in court. At the last hearing before Special judge Kuhar, Kanda had also filed an application seeking exemption from being present at the hearings. However, the court specifically admitted the plea only for that day and has listed the matter for next hearing on November 27 and 28.