The CBI and the family members of the Uphaar fire tragedy victims told the Supreme Court on Friday that real estate barons Sushil and Gopal Ansal should pay for their “callousness, greed and avarice,” causing the deaths of 59 innocent cinemagoers in the 1997 fire tragedy, with jail sentence provided for criminal negligence under the law and not a Rs. 60-crore fine.
Filing separate review petitions, the investigating agency and the Association for Victims of Uphaar Tragedy asked the Supreme Court to review in open court its September 22 judgment allowing the Ansals to walk free, provided they pay Rs. 30 crore each. The apex court spared them a prison term, though it had found the duo guilty of flouting public safety norms.
In fact, the judgment had said there was nothing “fruitful” in sending the Ansals to prison for their negligence, though it admitted that a “matter of this magnitude may call for a higher sentence”.
The CBI in its petition blamed the “Indian law for failing to keep pace with the needs of society by providing too lenient punishment for criminal negligence resulting in large casualties by acts of negligence, which are driven by greed and avarice”.
“In such a situation, to substitute a fine for even a short sentence of two years (the maximum permissible in law) would be contrary to the settled principles of sentencing,” the CBI said.
The judgment came despite the fact that three courts, from the trial court to the Supreme Court, had found there was no fire-fighting equipment or even walking space towards the exit of the cinema hall. The victims, many of them women and children, were trapped in the darkness of the hall as smoke from a blaze in an electric transformer choked them to death.
The three-judge Bench led by Justice Anil R. Dave had let the duo go on the sole ground that they were fairly advanced in age, and need not suffer jail.
“This case represents an unfortunate instance of greed and avarice getting the better of good sense, on account of which persons who claim to be well placed and respected in society flouted with impunity rules put in place by the law to safeguard public safety,” the CBI petition said.
The agency complained that the court did not even allow adequate time to present crucial evidence before deciding to substitute jail sentence with monetary fine.
The fact that the accused are elderly is no fault of the CBI. It were the Ansals who successfully got the trial dragged on for 18 years, the agency petition said.
“The age of the accused should not and cannot be factored in in the present case as a mitigating circumstance. The incident happened in 1997. The matter has been contested by the CBI and supported by the victim’s group vigorously. The trial was successfully delayed by the accused until such time as a directive was issued by the High Court to speed up the trial,” it said.
The agency said there was no parity in the punishment. That is, the Ansals have got out by paying Rs. 60 crore while the gatekeeper of the cinema hall has been sentenced to a two-year jail term for the same offence and a Delhi Vidyut Board official, who repaired the faulty transformer, to two years for a lesser offence.