MUMBAI: A businessman’s arrest in a 2017 extortion case was illegal and marked an abuse of police powers in alleged collusion with a developer, the Bombay high court ruled on Thursday, directing the Maharashtra government to pay him ₹ 5 lakh in compensation within two weeks.
A division bench of Justices AS Gadkari and Kamal Khata also called for strict action, including the immediate suspension of the police sub-inspector and other officers concerned. The society was undergoing redevelopment, and Agarwal was negotiating with the developer on behalf of his mother-in-law, who owned a flat there. Soon after he received the money, police arrived, handcuffed him and took him to Azad Maidan police station. It found discrepancies in the arrest records, including overwritten dates, missing information on the grounds of arrest and whether Agarwal’s wife had been informed, as well as contradictions between station diary entries and the FIR.
The case dates back to August 4, 2017, when Bipin Satish Chandra Agarwal was arrested after developers of New Aarti Co-operative Housing Society in Andheri East accused him of extortion. Agarwal told the court that he had negotiated the sale of a flat for approximately ₹ 1.64 crore. The developers allegedly handed him ₹ 2 lakh as an advance at their office that day. Subsequently, an FIR was registered against him for extortion under Section 384 of the Indian Penal Code. He secured bail from the sessions court on August 28, 2017, and subsequently challenged the legality of his arrest before the high court, citing inconsistencies in the record to indicate that his arrest was malafide and illegal. It also questioned why the police had not first examined the circumstances in which the ₹ 2 lakh was handed over or verified the complaint.
The action was apparently taken because Agarwal had refused to accept the deal offered and had threatened to expose alleged wrongdoing involving the developer and certain society members, according to the court.
Describing the arrest and remand as “high handed” and arbitrary, the court said they had been carried out “without application of mind and without following the basic statutory provisions of law. The bench said it was deeply anguished by what it found in the case, calling it a “classic case” of a police sub-inspector exploiting his position and using the police machinery to advance the developer’s interests.
