By IANS,
New Delhi : The Delhi High Court Saturday rejected the bail plea of Sanjeev Nanda, grandson of former Indian Navy chief Admiral S.M. Nanda, who was sentenced to five years’ rigorous imprisonment by a lower court for mowing down six people while driving his BMW in 1999.
“I am of the view that the appellant (Nanda) does not deserve suspension of sentence during the pendency of the case,” Justice Kailash Gambhir said.
However, court listed Nanda’s appeal challenging his sentence for hearing on day-to-day basis from Dec 1 for early disposal of the case.
The court observed that “social ill of drunken driving has been successful in making a distant niche in daily lives of human since the centuries of the recorded history”.
“Alcohol has been found to play a major role as a social evil not only in India but across other countries too. Drunken driving leads to the loss of several innocent lives on the roads, mostly of them belong to poor strata of society,” the judge said.
The court Friday reserved its order after hearing arguments from the Delhi Police and the defence counsel.
Nanda had challenged his conviction and five-year prison term awarded by a trial court earlier this month.
“A drunken driver not only puts his life into risk but also puts the life of other people at stake. Such driver is not less that a live human bomb, which prepares to blast himself and other innocent people on roads,” said the judge in his order, while asking the government to review the law on drunken driving.
Senior advocate Mukul Rohatgi, appearing for Nanda, earlier said it was a simple accident case and if the case is similar to Mumbai’s Alister Anthony Pareira, who had run over seven people and was awarded three-year imprisonment then why was Nanda being discriminated against.
Sanjeev Nanda was returning from a party in Gurgaon with his friends in a BMW car in the early hours of Jan 10, 1999, when he drove over six people in south Delhi’s Lodhi Colony area.