In a major setback to Tibetan leader Karmapa Ogyen Trinley Dorje, the Himachal Pradesh High Court has set aside a trial court's decision to drop charges against him in a currency seizure case and directed the government to go ahead with the trial.
A single bench of the high court of Justice Sureshwar Thakur said the impugned order of May 21, 2012 passed by the judicial magistrate of Una is quashed and dismissed the application preferred before it by the Assistant Public Prosecutor under Section 321 of the Cr.PC for permission to withdraw from prosecution against Karmapa.
The court directed the government to proceed in accordance with law against him and made it clear that the findings recorded herein above shall have no bearing on the merits of the case.
Disposing the petition of Gangtok-based NGO Denzong Nang-Ten Sung-kyob Tsogpa, the bench in 43-page order said that the judicial magistrate, while "accepting the prayer made by the Assistant Public Prosecutor for permission to withdraw from the prosecution against Karmapa appears to have in a rough shod and in a short shift manner, overlooking and abandoning the material on record pronouncing the tenable foisting of a role of criminal conspiracy".
The judicial magistrate has also in "her impugned order proceeded to exclude the germane apposite material conveying or communicating a role of conspirator to Karmapa and overlooked the factum of there being abundant as well as sufficient material on record to impute an inculpatory role to Karmapa", the order said.
The Karmapa was charged under Section 120 B (criminal conspiracy) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). He was the 10th accused in the seizure of currencies of 26 countries, including 120,197 Chinese yuan and around Rs 5. 3 million in Indian currency, from the Gyuto Tantric University and Monastery located on the outskirts of Dharamsala, the seat of the Tibetan government-in-exile in January, 2011.
It was after the seizure of Rs 1 crore meant for land purchase that police conducted searches at the monastery and recovered the currency.
The 30-year-old Buddhist monk, Karmapa is the spiritual head of the Karma Kagyu School, one of the four sects of Tibetan Buddhism.
"What disturbs this court is that the money amounting Rs 1 crore, nabbed from the vehicle on January 26, 2011, was dishonestly divulged by the occupants of the vehicle," Justice Thakur observed.
The unaccounted foreign money, in transgression of the norms of its legal conversion into Indian currency, was utilised for settlement or finalisation of the shady land transaction, he said.
"As per the investigations, the land transaction by K P Bhardwaj, Swatantar Mahajan and Sher Singh and the authorised signatories of the Karma Garchan Trust was finalised for Rs 5 crore and the sale transaction smacks of the taint of its being reared with unaccounted foreign money illegally converted into Indian money," the high court said.
The Karmapa had already got a clean chit from the Enforcement Directorate, which dropped charges of foreign exchange violations against him but ordered confiscation of the foreign currency recovered from his monastery.
