New Delhi, March 30: The Supreme Court today nudged the Centre to tighten the legal deterrence to rash and drunken driving, opposing leniency for drivers who consider themselves "emperors of all they survey" and kill or maim people with "a nonchalant attitude".
"Drunkenness contributes to careless driving where other people become their prey. The poor feel that their lives are not safe, the pedestrians think of uncertainty, and civilised persons drive in constant fear but still apprehensive about the obnoxious attitude of the people who project themselves as 'larger than life'," the apex court said in a judgment.
"India has a disreputable record of road accidents. There is a nonchalant attitude among the drivers. They feel that they are the 'emperors of all they survey'."
It added: "We are bound to observe that the lawmakers should scrutinise, re-look and revisit the sentencing policy in Section 304A, IPC (Indian Penal Code). We say so with immense anguish."
Section 304A deals with "causing death by negligence" through "rash or negligent" acts and prescribes a maximum jail term of two years but also allows a convict to get away by just paying a fine.
The directive comes at a time Bollywood star Salman Khan faces trial in Mumbai on the charge of running over sleeping pavement dwellers in a drunken state in September 2002, killing one and injuring four.
Salman, who has denied he was drunk or was driving, was initially charged under Section 304A but the case was later brought under Section 304 (culpable homicide not amounting to murder), which entails up to 10 years in jail. Both this section too provides for a fine in lieu of a prison term.
"It seems to us (that) driving in a drunken state, in a rash and negligent manner or driving with youthful adventurous enthusiasm as if there are no traffic rules or no discipline of law has come to the centre stage," the bench of Justices Dipak Misra and P.C. Pant said.
"The protagonists, as we perceive, have lost all respect for law. A man with the means has, in possibility, graduated himself to harbour the idea that he can escape from the substantive sentence by payment of compensation."
It added: "Such developing of notions is a dangerous phenomenon in an orderly society. Young age cannot be a plea to be accepted in all circumstances. Life to the poor or the impecunious is as worth living for as it is to the rich and the luxuriously temperamental."
The bench upheld a Punjab government appeal against a state high court order reducing the sentence of a "rash and negligent driver" involved in the death of two persons to just 24 days (period already undergone).
Accused Saurab Bakshi had originally been sentenced to a year in jail by the chief judicial magistrate, Patiala, and the additional sessions judge had upheld the sentence.
But the high court reduced the term noting that Bakshi had paid a compensation of Rs 85,000 to the families of the dead over and above the damages awarded by a motor accidents tribunal. The apex court sentenced Bakshi to six months in jail.
Writing the judgment, Justice Misra put the high court verdict "absolutely in the realm of misplaced sympathy".
He accepted that the principle of sentencing recognised any corrective measures taken but added that there were circumstances where deterrence was imperative.
"Neither law nor the court that implements the law should ever get oblivious of the fact that in such accidents precious lives are lost or the victims who survive are crippled for life which, in a way, is worse than death," he wrote.
Failure to take deterrent action in such cases not just amounts to a mockery of justice, the judgment said, but erodes public confidence in the judicial system.
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