Badri Rai and Another vs The State Of Bihar

Rewritten Version Notice: This is a rewritten version of the original judgment.

Court: Supreme Court of India

Case Number: Criminal Appeal No. 79 of 1956

Decision Date: 18 August, 1958

Coram: Bhuvneshwar P. Sinha, Syed Jaffer Imam

In the matter titled Badri Rai and Another versus The State of Bihar, the Supreme Court of India delivered its judgment on 18 August 1958. The bench hearing the appeal comprised Justice Bhuvneshwar P. Sinha and Justice Syed Jaffer Imam. The case was reported in 1958 AIR 953 and 1959 SCR 1141. The appellants were tried under section 120B read with section 165A of the Indian Penal Code, which pertain respectively to criminal conspiracy and the offence of bribing a public servant. The evidential issue concerned the admissibility of a co-conspirator’s statement under section 10 of the Indian Evidence Act, 1872. The headnote records that the prosecution alleged that on 24 August 1953 the Inspector of Police, who was investigating a case involving the second appellant, was stopped on a road and the second appellant requested that the investigation be suppressed in exchange for a valuable consideration. Subsequently, on 31 August, the first appellant approached the same Inspector at the police station and handed him a packet containing five hundred rupees in cash, declaring that the money had been transmitted by the second appellant as payment for the earlier request to “hush up” the case. The lower courts accepted the prosecution’s evidence, convicted both appellants, and sentenced them under the aforementioned provisions.

Upon granting special leave to appeal, the appellants contended that the trial court had no reasonable basis to infer a conspiracy between them, and that the statement made on 31 August should not be admissible against the second appellant for two reasons. First, they argued that the charge of conspiracy under section 120B was deliberately introduced solely to render one party’s statement admissible against the other. Second, they asserted that the object of the conspiracy—the payment of the hush money—had already been fulfilled before the statement in question was made, rendering the statement irrelevant to proving any ongoing unlawful agreement. The Supreme Court held that the encounter on 24 August was sufficient evidence that both appellants entertained the intention to commit the bribery offence at that time, thereby establishing a clear indication of a conspiracy existing on or before that date. Consequently, the Court found the statement of the first appellant on 31 August admissible not only to demonstrate that the second appellant had employed the first as his agent in the crime, but also to prove the existence of the conspiracy itself. Accordingly, the charge under section 120B, together with section 165A, was properly framed. Moreover, the Court concluded that the payment of the bribe and the accompanying statement on 31 August were components of the same transaction, undertaken in the course of the conspiracy, and therefore the statement was admissible under section 10 of the Indian Evidence Act. The judgment relied on the authorities Mirza Akbar v. The King Emperor (1940) L.R. 67 I.A. 336 and R. v. Blake (1844) 6 Q.B. 126 in reaching this conclusion.

The Court observed that the payment and the accompanying statement, identified as the 1142 statement, formed part of the same transaction because they were made during the course of the conspiracy. Accordingly, the statement was held to be admissible under section 10 of the Indian Evidence Act. In arriving at this conclusion, the Court relied on the authorities Mirza Akbar v. The King Emperor (1940) L.R. 67 I.A. 336 and R. v. Blake (1844) 6 Q.B. 126. The matter before the Court was a criminal appeal, numbered 79 of 1956, filed by special leave against the judgments and orders dated 7 September 1955 of the Patna High Court in Criminal Appeal No. 370 of 1954. Those judgments themselves had arisen from the order dated 26 July 1954 of the Special Judge at Bhagalpur in Special Case No. 14 of 1954. Counsel for appellant No. 1 was B.R.L. Iyengar, while counsel for appellant No. 2 comprised S.P. Sinha and P.C. Agarwala. The respondent was represented by R.C. Prasad. The judgment was delivered on 18 August 1958 by Justice Sinha. The appeal challenged the concurrent convictions and sentences imposed by the lower courts on the two appellants under section 120B read with section 165A of the Indian Penal Code. Both appellants had been sentenced to rigorous imprisonment for eighteen months, ordered to pay a fine of Rs. 200 each, and, in the event of default, to undergo a further six months of rigorous imprisonment. In addition, the first appellant, Badri, had been separately convicted under section 165A and sentenced to an additional eighteen months of rigorous imprisonment, to run concurrently with the sentence imposed under the joint charge.

The factual background, as recorded by the trial courts and not successfully contested on appeal, described the second appellant, Ramji Sonar, as a goldsmith who operated a shop on the main road of the village Naogachia. The shop was located between the police-station building and the residential quarters of the police inspector who acted as the first informant in the case, a circumstance that contributed to the convictions and sentences previously mentioned. The first appellant, Badri, was the proprietor of a school for small boys situated approximately fifty yards from Ramji’s shop. On 22 August 1953, the police inspector, who was in charge of the police station, executed a seizure of certain ornaments and molten silver from a vacant building situated in front of Ramji’s house. The seized items were being melted by six strangers who had arrived from distant places, using melting implements that were alleged to have been supplied by Ramji. The seizure was conducted on the suspicion that the ornaments and molten silver constituted stolen property that was intended to be sold to Ramji in a form that could not be identified as stolen. Following the preparation of a seizure-list, the police officer arrested Ramji together with the six strangers present at the scene.

On the same day that the second appellant, Ramji, was released on bail, the police investigations into the matter began in earnest. During the early hours of 24 August 1953, at approximately 7:30 p.m., the Inspector was travelling from his residential quarters to the police station when he was stopped on the road by both appellants. At that moment Ramji urged the Inspector to suppress the pending case in exchange for a valuable consideration. The Inspector replied that he could not discuss the matter on the road and directed them to appear before him at the police station. Following this encounter the Inspector formally reported the incident to his senior officer, the District Superintendent of Police (recorded as PW 8), and also informed the sub-inspector attached to the same station (recorded as PW 9). A week later, on 31 August 1953, the first appellant, Badri, arrived at the police station, entered the central room where the Inspector was present, and presented the officer with a packet wrapped in an old newspaper. Inside the packet were currency notes totalling Rs 500. Badri asserted to the Inspector, as recorded in PW 1, that the money had been conveyed to him by Ramji as a bribe intended to induce the Inspector to conceal the case against Ramji. At the time of this offer a number of police officers were present, together with a local merchant identified as PW 7. The Inspector immediately drafted a first information report based on his own statement, prepared a seizure-list of the offered money, and proceeded to arrest Badri, placing him in the station lock-up. Subsequent investigations led to the trial of both appellants, resulting in the judgment previously noted. Both lower courts concluded that the prosecution’s case, as summarised above, was established by good and reliable evidence and rejected the defence’s contention that the prosecution had been initiated out of spite or to shield the Inspector from the consequences of an unlawful arrest of Ramji. The courts were not persuaded by the tentative criticism of the prosecution’s evidence advanced by the defence. Ordinarily, this Court refrains from disturbing concurrent findings of fact. The principal issue raised on appeal concerned the admissibility of Badri’s statement made on 31 August 1953, wherein he claimed that Ramji had sent him the money to be offered as a bribe. The learned counsel for the appellant was unable to articulate a clear ground of objection to the admissibility of this evidence, which formed the basis of the charge against both accused. Section 10 of the Indian Evidence Act provides a definitive answer to that contention. The section reads: “10. Where there is reasonable ground to believe”.

Section 10 of the Indian Evidence Act states that when two or more persons have conspired together to commit an offence or an actionable wrong, any statement, act or writing made by any one of them that relates to their common intention, after the intention was first formed by any of them, is relevant against each conspirator. Such evidence may be used both to prove that the conspiracy existed and to show that each person was a party to it. The Court observed that the event of 24 August, when both appellants went to the police inspector and proposed that he suppress the case against the second appellant in exchange for a considerable reward, clearly demonstrated that the two men had conspired to bribe a public servant in connection with the performance of his official duties. Consequently, the Court found no doubt that it had reasonable grounds to believe that the appellants had entered into a conspiracy to commit the offence. On that basis, the charge under section 120B of the Indian Penal Code was properly framed against both appellants. Because the charge was correctly framed, any statement or act made by either appellant that referred to the common intention – namely, the conspiracy to offer a bribe – was admissible against both of them. The statement made by the first appellant on 31 August, in which he declared that the second appellant had sent him to make the bribe offer so that the ongoing investigation could be silenced, was therefore admissible not only against the maker of the statement, but also against the second appellant, who had employed the first as his agent to further the conspiratorial purpose. That statement served both to establish that the second appellant had used the first as his agent in the commission of the crime and to confirm the existence of the conspiracy itself. The incident of 24 August showed that the intention to commit the crime had been entertained by both men on or before that date. Accordingly, any statement, act or writing by either conspirator made on or after that date, until the object of the conspiracy was achieved, was evidence against both. It was suggested, on behalf of the second appellant, that the prosecution had deliberately introduced the charge under section 120B solely to render the 31 August statement admissible against the second appellant, arguing that without such a charge the statement could not be used as evidence against him. The Court rejected that suggestion, noting again that the 24 August episode was a clear indication of a conspiracy and that the charge under section 120B was fully justified. The Court further observed that it is not a permissible legal argument to claim that, unless the charge under that section had been framed, the act or statement of one conspirator could not be admitted against the other.

The Court observed that Section 10 of the Indian Evidence Act was deliberately enacted to permit the acts and statements of one co-conspirator to be admissible against the entire group of conspirators because of the secretive nature of a conspiracy. A conspiracy, the Court explained, is planned in secrecy and carried out in darkness, which makes it impractical for the prosecution to link each isolated act or statement of one accused with the acts or statements of the others unless a common bond connects them. Normally, especially in criminal matters, one person is not held liable for the conduct of another. Liability can arise only when there is evidence of a coordinated effort in furtherance of a shared intention to commit a crime. At that point, the law introduces the rule of common responsibility on the principle that every participant in a conspiracy acts as the agent of the others. The Court held that once the court has reasonable grounds to believe that a number of persons share an identity of interest or a common purpose, any act, statement or declaration made by one co-conspirator is naturally treated as the act or statement of the remaining conspirators, provided that act or declaration relates to the object of the conspiracy. Acts that are stray or performed in darkness, without reference to the common purpose, cannot be understood unless they are connected to the chain of acts or illegal omissions attributable to individual members of the conspiracy. The Court also addressed the contention that the statement made by the first appellant on August 31 regarding the purpose of the payment should be excluded because it was allegedly made after the payment and after the object of the conspiracy had been achieved. Counsel relied on the Judicial Committee decision in Mirza Akbar v. The King Emperor (1) to support that view. The Court noted, however, that the Mirza Akbar decision itself answered the contention raised, citing the report (1940) L.R. 67 I.A. 336. The Court explained that the payment was made and the accompanying statement that the payment was intended to hush up the case against the second appellant formed part of the same transaction; consequently, the statement was made contemporaneously with the act of bribery and not after the conspiracy’s object had been accomplished. The Court clarified that the object of the conspiracy was to conceal the criminal case against the second appellant by bribing the public servant overseeing the investigation, and that this objective was still far from being fulfilled when the August 31 statement was uttered. The Court referred to the leading authority of R. v. Blake (1) as an authority that addresses both the positive and negative aspects of admissibility in such circumstances.

In this case, the Court examined the question of which evidence could be admitted when it pertained to a conspiracy. The authority cited set out a clear rule regarding admissibility. It explained that documents which were actually employed to carry out the purpose of the conspiracy are admissible, whereas documents that were prepared by a conspirator after the conspiratorial purpose had already been fulfilled are not admissible. The Court noted that this principle is reflected in section ten of the Indian Evidence Act, which follows the same approach. Applying this rule to the present matter, the Court found that the statement in dispute was made by the first appellant while the conspiracy was still in progress and that the statement accompanied the payment of the bribe. Because the statement was contemporaneous with the act that furthered the conspiratorial objective, it falls squarely within the ambit of section ten, as previously quoted. Consequently, the Court concluded that the appeal raised no substantive question of law, since the evidential issue had been resolved by the established rule. Accordingly, the appeal was dismissed. (1) (1844) 6 Q.B. 126; 115 E.R. 49.