A Patwari was convicted of taking a Rs 9,500 bribe on the strength of a trap and tainted currency recovered from his pocket. The Supreme Court acquitted him: proof of a demand for gratification, and its acceptance, is indispensable to a corruption conviction, and here the complainant had died before deposing and the shadow witness had turned hostile, so no witness actually proved the demand or the acceptance.
New Delhi: The Supreme Court has acquitted a Patwari in a Prevention of Corruption Act case, holding that the recovery of tainted currency cannot, by itself, sustain a conviction, and that proof of both the demand and the acceptance of illegal gratification is a sine qua non for conviction under Sections 7 and 13 of the Act [Jaswinder Singh (Dead through LRs) v. State of Punjab].
A Bench of Justice Ujjal Bhuyan and Justice K. Vinod Chandran, in a judgment authored by Justice Bhuyan, allowed the appeal and set aside the concurrent conviction recorded by the Special Judge, Hoshiarpur and affirmed by the Punjab and Haryana High Court.
The case
The appellant, a Patwari, was alleged to have demanded a bribe from an informant who had approached him for the mutation of a property in favour of the legal heirs. On the informant’s complaint, the Vigilance Bureau registered an FIR and organised a trap; the tainted currency notes were said to have been handed over to the appellant on demand and recovered from his trouser pocket, with the phenolphthalein test proving positive. The Special Judge convicted him under Section 7 read with Section 13(2) of the PC Act and sentenced him to two years’ rigorous imprisonment, and the High Court affirmed the conviction in 2013. The appellant died during the pendency of the appeal, which was thereafter prosecuted by his legal representatives.
Demand and acceptance a sine qua non
The Court reiterated the law settled by the Constitution Bench in Neeraj Dutta v. State (NCT of Delhi): to sustain a conviction under Sections 7 and 13(1)(d) of the PC Act, it must be proved beyond reasonable doubt that the public servant demanded and accepted, or agreed to accept, the illegal gratification. The demand for a bribe, it held, is the sine qua non for establishing the offence; an offer by the bribe-giver and the demand by the public servant have both to be proved by the prosecution as facts in issue, and mere acceptance of an amount, without proof of demand, is not sufficient to establish the offence.
While demand and acceptance may be proved by direct or by circumstantial evidence, the Court held, they must be proved; the recovery of tainted currency, standing alone and unaccompanied by proof of demand, does not make out the offence.
No witness proved the demand or acceptance
On the evidence, the Court found the foundational facts unproved. The informant, the person who alone could speak to the demand made to him and to his handing over the money, had died before he could depose, and the shadow witness had turned hostile. In the result, no witness had seen the appellant make the demand for the bribe, and no witness had seen the informant hand over the money to the appellant or the appellant accept it.
With neither the demand nor the acceptance proved, the Court held, the ingredients of the offence were not established, and the conviction could not be sustained, however the recovery of the tainted notes might otherwise appear. Relying on B. Jayaraj, P. Satyanarayana Murthy, Neeraj Dutta and Aman Bhatia, the Court set aside the conviction and sentence, declared that the charge under the PC Act could not be proved, and cleared the appellant. The appeal was allowed.
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Why it matters
The judgment applies the bright-line rule of Neeraj Dutta to a situation that recurs in trap cases: the collapse of the prosecution’s evidence on the very demand it must prove. A corruption conviction is not made out by the fact of money passing hands or being recovered; the law requires proof that the public servant demanded the gratification and accepted it as such. Where the witnesses who alone can establish that demand are unavailable, the complainant through death, the shadow witness through hostility, the case loses its foundation, and the tainted-money recovery, equivocal on its own, cannot fill the gap.
The distinction the Court preserved is between the acceptance of money and the acceptance of a bribe. Recovery establishes that currency was found on the accused; it does not establish that it was demanded and received as illegal gratification, which is the offence. That is why the demand is the sine qua non, and why its proof cannot be presumed from recovery alone; the statutory presumption that assists the prosecution arises only after demand and acceptance are independently proved, not before.
The case is also a study in how the fortunes of a corruption trial can turn on the availability of witnesses. A trap is engineered around the complainant and the shadow witness precisely so that the demand and acceptance can be spoken to at trial; when the complainant dies before deposing and the shadow witness resiles, the engineered proof falls away. The acquittal, coming after the appellant’s own death and prosecuted by his legal representatives, clears his name posthumously, and stands as a reminder that in corruption cases, as elsewhere, a conviction must rest on proof of every ingredient of the offence, not on suspicion drawn from recovery.
Case Title: Jaswinder Singh (Dead through LRs) v. State of Punjab [Criminal Appeal No. 2137 of 2014]
Bench: Justice Ujjal Bhuyan and Justice K. Vinod Chandran, Supreme Court of India
Neutral Citation: 2026 INSC 1031
Status: Appeal allowed. Concurrent conviction under Sections 7 and 13(2) of the PC Act set aside; demand and acceptance of the bribe held not proved, the complainant having died before deposing and the shadow witness having turned hostile.