Nobody in the raiding party saw the demand: Supreme Court clears a Patwari eight years after his death
Twenty-four years after the trap, the Court holds that recovery of marked notes proves nothing without proof of demand, and sets aside a conviction the accused did not live to contest.
Jaswinder Singh was convicted in February 2004 of demanding a bribe to record a mutation entry. The Punjab and Haryana High Court affirmed that conviction in November 2013. He died while his appeal was pending in the Supreme Court, and his legal representatives were substituted in 2018 to carry it on. On 22 September 2026, in Jaswinder Singh (Dead Through LRs.) v. State of Punjab, a Bench of Justice Ujjal Bhuyan and Justice Arun Palli set the conviction aside and declared that the charge could not be proved.
The reason is one the Court has now stated many times, and it is worth stating plainly: in a trap case, recovery of the marked currency from the accused proves nothing at all unless the demand is first proved. Here, on the prosecution’s own witnesses, nobody saw the demand, nobody saw the money change hands, and nobody saw it recovered.
A mutation, and a trap
At the relevant time Jaswinder Singh was serving as a Patwari. Satwinder Kaur, the widow of one Chain Singh, had applied on 13 March 2002 to have her late husband’s land mutated in the names of his legal heirs. The application was marked to the appellant. The informant, Kulwant Singh, was the deceased’s brother.
The allegation was that the appellant demanded Rs 10,000 to do the needful, and that after negotiation the figure was settled at Rs 9,500. The informant was asked to bring the money to the office on 19 April 2002. Instead he went to the Vigilance Bureau, where a Deputy Superintendent of Police registered an FIR on his statement and organised a raid.
The trap itself was conventional. The informant handed the DSP nineteen currency notes of Rs 500 each. The DSP treated them with phenolphthalein powder and returned them, directing the informant to hand them over to the appellant on demand. Onkar Singh was instructed to act as the shadow witness and to signal the raiding party once the money was accepted on demand. Harnandan Singh and Balkar Singh were joined as official witnesses, and the working of the phenolphthalein powder was demonstrated to them before the party set out.
The prosecution case was that the informant handed over the currency and that it was recovered from the appellant. The Special Judge, Hoshiarpur, convicted him on 25 February 2004 under Section 7 read with Section 13(2) of the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988, and sentenced him to two years’ rigorous imprisonment with a fine of Rs 10,000. The High Court dismissed his appeal on 28 November 2013.
The Supreme Court issued notice in July 2014 and granted leave that September, directing his release on bail after noting he had already been in jail for about seven months. He died before the appeal could be heard. By an order of the Chamber Judge dated 12 October 2018 his legal representatives were substituted and stepped into his shoes to contest it.
What the offence actually requires
The judgment sets out the statutory scheme as it stood in 2002 before turning to the evidence, and the sequence matters, because the conviction failed on the ingredients rather than on any question of credibility at large.
Section 7 as it then stood dealt with a public servant taking gratification other than legal remuneration in respect of an official act. It covered a person who, being or expecting to be a public servant, accepts or obtains or agrees to accept or attempts to obtain, from any person, for himself or another, any gratification other than legal remuneration as a motive or reward for doing or not doing an official act, or for showing or not showing favour or disfavour in the exercise of his official functions. The punishment was imprisonment of not less than three years extending to seven, with fine.
Five explanations qualify that section, and they are broader than the ordinary reading suggests. Explanation (a) addresses a person who is not in fact expecting office but obtains gratification by deceiving others into believing he is about to hold it and will then serve them: he may be guilty of cheating, but not of the offence under Section 7. Explanation (b) makes clear that gratification is not confined to money or to what is estimable in money. Explanation (c) provides that legal remuneration is not restricted to what a public servant may lawfully demand, but includes everything he is permitted to accept. Explanation (d) extends “a motive or reward for doing” to a person who receives gratification for doing what he does not intend to do, is not in a position to do, or has not done. Explanation (e) covers the public servant who induces a person to believe erroneously that his influence with the Government has secured that person a benefit, and so induces a payment.
Section 13(1) defined criminal misconduct, including where a public servant habitually accepts or obtains or agrees to accept or attempts to obtain any gratification other than legal remuneration as a motive or reward of the kind mentioned in Section 7, or obtains any valuable thing without consideration or for a consideration he knows to be inadequate from a person concerned in a proceeding or business transacted by him, and extending to dishonest or fraudulent misappropriation of property. Sub-section (2) provided the punishment. A Patwari is a public servant within Section 2(c), which covers any person in the service or pay of the Government.
Demand is the gravamen
The Court anchored the legal position in a line of authority culminating in a Constitution Bench.
In Neeraj Dutta v. State (Government of NCT of Delhi), a five-Judge Bench considered whether, in the absence of the complainant’s evidence or direct or primary evidence of demand, it is permissible to draw an inferential deduction of guilt under Sections 7 and 13(1)(d) read with 13(2) from other evidence adduced by the prosecution. Its conclusions confirm both that an offer by the bribe-giver and a demand by the public servant are essential, and that proof of demand remains indispensable, whether by direct or by circumstantial evidence.
The summary of conclusions in Neeraj Dutta repays reading in full, because it is the framework every trap case is now tested against. Proof of demand and acceptance of illegal gratification, as a fact in issue, is a sine qua non for guilt under Sections 7 and 13(1)(d)(i) and (ii). The prosecution must first prove the demand and then the acceptance, as matters of fact. That fact in issue may be proved by direct evidence, oral or documentary — and, in the absence of direct evidence, by circumstantial evidence. The Bench also separated two situations that are often conflated: where the bribe-giver offers payment without any demand and the public servant simply accepts, that is acceptance under Section 7 and no prior demand need be shown; where the public servant makes the demand and the bribe-giver then tenders what was demanded, both limbs must be established.
In Aman Bhatia v. State, a two-Judge Bench examining the conviction of a stamp vendor held that mere recovery of tainted money is, by itself, insufficient to establish the charges. To sustain a conviction under Sections 7 and 13(1)(d), it must be proved beyond reasonable doubt that the public servant voluntarily accepted the money knowing it to be a bribe. The demand for a bribe, the Court said, is the sine qua non of the offence under Section 7.
The proposition the judgment distils is stated without qualification: proof of demand of illegal gratification is the gravamen of the offence under Sections 7 and 13(1)(d)(i) and (ii), and in its absence the charge must fail. Mere acceptance of an amount said to be illegal gratification, or its recovery, divorced from proof of demand, is not enough to bring home the charge. Failure to prove the demand is fatal, and mere recovery of the amount from the accused does not entail conviction. Without evidence of demand it cannot be said that the public servant used corrupt or illegal means, or abused his position, to obtain any valuable thing or pecuniary advantage under Section 13(1)(d).
Two witnesses who were not there
Against that standard, the Court turned to what the prosecution’s own witnesses had said.
The informant, examined as PW-1, deposed broadly in line with his complaint: that the widow had approached the appellant for the mutation, that he demanded a bribe, that the amount was fixed at Rs 9,500 after negotiation, that he told his friend Onkar Singh about it at the village bus stop, and that on his advice he reported the matter to the DSP.
But the evidence that decided the appeal came from the two men who were meant to corroborate him. PW-2, Onkar Singh, was the shadow witness, made part of the raiding party and told by the DSP to accompany the informant into the office. PW-4, Harnandan Singh, was an official witness deputed to the raiding party under orders of the Deputy Commissioner, Hoshiarpur.
PW-4 said in examination-in-chief that the informant and Onkar Singh went into the office, that the raiding party went in on Onkar Singh’s signal, that the accused was apprehended, and that the DSP recovered nineteen currency notes from the front pocket of his shirt, their particulars tallying with the list already prepared. In cross-examination he stated that the money was not handed over by the informant to the appellant in his presence.
PW-2 went further. His statement to the police under Section 161 CrPC had recorded that he was informed by the vigilance party that the recovery was made from the shirt pocket while he stood behind the other members of the party. In cross-examination he asserted that the recovery was not made in his presence at all. He stated categorically that the money allegedly paid by the informant to the appellant was not paid in his presence, because at that point he had come out of the office — and that none of the raiding party saw any demand or any acceptance of the bribe money.
There was also a discrepancy the Court noted on the way. The informant, in his complaint and his evidence, said the appellant had put the money in his trouser pocket and that it was recovered from there. PW-2’s account, on what the vigilance party told him, was that it came from the shirt pocket.
The chain that was never made
What the Court drew from this is narrow and complete. Both PW-2 and PW-4 deposed that the money was neither paid by the informant to the appellant nor recovered from his possession in their presence. On that state of the evidence, neither demand nor acceptance could be said to have been proved: no one saw the appellant make the demand, no one saw the informant hand over the money, and no one saw the appellant accept it.
That left only the recovery — which, on Satyanarayana Murthy, Neeraj Dutta and Aman Bhatia, cannot carry a conviction on its own. The facts, the Bench held, were squarely covered by those decisions, and the conviction could not be sustained.
It is worth noting how carefully the judgment dates its own statutory text. Sections 7 and 13 are set out throughout as they stood at the relevant point of time — that is, in 2002 — because the provisions have since been recast. A case that takes twenty-four years to reach its conclusion is tried on the law of the year of the trap, not the law of the year of the judgment, and the reasoning here is therefore addressed to the older text even as the requirement of proof of demand has survived every redrafting of it.
For investigating agencies the lesson is about how a trap is built rather than how it is written up. The shadow witness exists precisely to see and hear what the complainant says he experienced. A shadow witness who steps out of the room before the transaction, and an official witness who does not see the money pass, leave the prosecution with a recovery and nothing to explain it. That gap cannot be filled at the appellate stage by the strength of the complainant’s own word.
A clearance that came too late
The chronology is its own comment. The FIR was registered in April 2002. Conviction followed in February 2004 and imprisonment of some seven months. The High Court affirmed in November 2013, more than nine years later. Leave was granted in September 2014, and the appeal was decided in September 2026 — twenty-four years after the trap and twenty-two after the conviction.
Jaswinder Singh did not live to hear it. The declaration that the charge against him could not be proved was received by the legal representatives who had carried his appeal for the last eight years of its life, and whatever it restores, it does not restore to him.
Order
The judgment and order of the Special Judge, Hoshiarpur dated 25 February 2004 in Corruption Case No. 7 of 2002, as affirmed by the High Court on 28 November 2013, were set aside. The Court declared that the charge framed against Jaswinder Singh under Sections 7 and 13(2) of the Prevention of Corruption Act could not be proved, and that he stands cleared of those charges. The appeal was allowed.