June-August, 2010
Returning from Manali at the start of June in 2011, I had
the naive hope that the charge sheet would have been filed during my leave. Six months had passed since my arrest but
sadly it had not been completed yet and the police claimed that they were still
waiting for the test results. Okay, well
at least 45+ days have passed since we sent in the Right To Information letter
to the FDA (Food & Drug Administration) and seeing has they have 30 days by
law to reply, there should be some news there...but disappointingly there
wasn’t.
The lawyers offered that we could submit an application to
try and get my passport back in order to make it a bit easier for me to travel
in India as well as facilitating some tasks like buying a SIM card for a phone
or renting a scooter. Here was another
hurry up and wait. I met a junior lawyer
Namrata at the courthouse and signed the application. Two days later at 9:30am I had to get the
court order from the lawyer’s office in Mapsa and take it immediately to the
Pernem police station. The matter was
going to be heard in court at 2:30pm and Sachin had to be there. What?!?
First off, this felt odd that I was essentially serving
papers to the officer who had fabricated the case against me to make him go to
court. Don’t subpoenas work the other
way around? Then, as my luck would have
it, my scooter wouldn’t start outside the lawyer’s office. I walked it to a scooter mechanic who was
luckily just a few blocks away. After
some tinkering, they diagnosed that a part needed to be replaced so it was best
to call the owner. I ended up taking a
taxi to Pernem and delivered the papers at 11am. Well it didn’t matter as the issue was not
heard in court that day. After numerous
postponements by the court over the course of a few weeks, I was told that the
court was not actually in a proper functioning state.
I found out more about this aspect of the NDPS Court
(Narcotic Drugs & Psychotropic Substances) not operating over the next few
months and it turned out that a judge recently retired and he was replaced by a
new guy, PV Sawaikar. After presiding
over some cases at the start of 2010, a lawyer raised an issue that Sawaikar
wasn’t properly vetted and didn’t truly have the powers to judge these narcotic
cases. So a higher court gave this power
to an already very busy female judge, Nutan Sarvessai, in the Sessions Court in
Panjim. My lawyers told me that it was
unprecedented that it had been so long that the NDPS Court was in this
state. Supposedly part of the reason for
it taking so long was that the Goan Home Minister, Ravi Naik, wanted to put in
a judge sympathetic to him as his son was a big drug dealer in north Goa and
Mr. Naik did not want him to be arrested...can you believe that!?! What luck I seem to be having with this, what
I began to call the “Arambol Affair”.
So now the lawyers presented my application to the Sessions
Court but in the end I was told that currently the judge only has powers to
perform bail and remand decisions...great.
So this application ended up dying before being heard in court.
From mid June to the first week of July of 2011, I kept
asking my lawyers about the letter to the FDA.
The junior advocate Vijeta finally confessed that the letter had been returned
to their office, not once but twice! In
April when I had offered to take the letter to the FDA myself, she had mailed
it to the wrong address. It was returned
and the lawyers resent it in early June but this time they forgot to attach the
10 rupee fee stamps required for all “Right To Information” requests. The letter had been returned to the lawyers
with a letter identifying their error. Surely
writing and sending this letter cost more than 10 rupees. So I lost a month of time due to 10 bloody
rupees...20 cents! Incredible
India. To add more frustration, the
letter back from the FDA asking for the fee had been sitting in the lawyer’s
office for 10 days and it wasn’t until I asked Vijeta about it that she told
me. I’m not too good at getting very
angry at other people but I let Vijeta know I was upset. She claimed that they had been extremely busy
but that’s a weak excuse in that if they had made a two minute phone call to me
ten days prior I would have taken the matter into my own hands and delivered
the letter myself, which I did in the end.
On July 5th, I collected the letter from the
lawyers and took it to Panjim. The FDA
office was located up on a hill and was relatively easy to find. I found the State Public Information Officer
and was a bit surprised that she recognized my name. I paid my 10 f’n rupees and went on my way.
On the way back through Mapsa, I stopped in at the lawyer’s
office again and expressed my frustration with Caroline about the fact that I
felt any progress had been delayed by 2 ½ months due to their errors. She claimed that the letter was merely a
tactic to try and put pressure on them to get the analysis done and that even
if they responded within 30 days (as they must with RTI requests) it didn’t
mean that they had done the testing. She
only figured that it would take about a day to do the actual testing and there
aren’t that many drug cases in Goa so she didn’t know why it was taking so
long. I asked what the longest amount of
time to get a charge sheet was that she had seen, and for just a charas case,
mine was the longest. Nice.
She suggested that I write a letter of petition to the High Court
stating that I was stuck here, unable to work and that it had been 7 months now and there was still no
charge sheet. I should also mention that
the fact that Judge PV Sawaikar, the new judge in the NDPS court in Mapsa, didn’t
have the power to pass rulings anymore was causing backlogs in the Sessions
court which is a problem for many other people.
She thought that I should deliver the letter myself and ask them how
long I should expect to receive an answer back.
I delivered the letter in mid July to the High Court and surprisingly
received an answer back a month later that just said: “I am directed to inform
you, to approach the concerned Court/Office for redressal of your
grievance.” Geez, thanks guys...the
whole problem is that my “concerned” court wasn’t functioning...so what was I
supposed to do?
Only two weeks after I personally delivered the letter to
the FDA, we received an answer. The
letter said that they received the sample on December 10, 2010, three days
after I was arrested. They finally
tested it on June 24, 2011 and sent a copy to the Superintendent of Police Crime,
Dona Paula in Panjim on June 27, 2011.
The lab test takes 5 days to perform but they took 197 days to do it,
and didn’t have to say why! Looking at
the timings of the letters, the second letter without the 10 rupee stamps would
have arrived at the FDA just about a week before they actually tested it. Couple that with the fact that the woman
there recognized my name, I think that when they received this letter they
thought “Oh shit, where is this stuff we need to test? We must have forgotten about it. Oh, it’s in this back closet. Okay, quick, someone test it.”
With that step complete, it should only take the cops a week
or two to finally submit the charge sheet.
Oh, wishful thinking Dave. Even
with having Karen from the UK Consulate call the police multiple times to make
sure they quickly did their bit, it took until August 23rd until it
was filed with the court! Finally...it
only took 9 ½ months to get the charge sheet...
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