Hon'ble Judges/Coram:
B.N. Agrawal, G.S. Singhvi and Aftab Alam

JUDGMENT

Aftab Alam, J.

1. The present is a fall out from a criminal trial arising from a hit and run accident on a cold winter morning in Delhi in which a car travelling at reckless speed crashed through a police check post and crushed to death six people, including three policemen. Facing the trial, as the main accused, was a young person called Sanjeev Nanda coming from a very wealthy business family. According to the prosecution, the accident was caused by Sanjeev Nanda who, in an inebriated state, was driving a black BMW car at very high speed. The trial, commonly called as the BMW case, was meandering endlessly even after eight years of the accident and in the year 2007, it was not proceeding very satisfactorily at all from the point of view of the prosecution. The status of the main accused coupled with the flip flop of the prosecution witnesses evoked considerable media attention and public interest. To the people who watch TV and read newspapers it was yet another case that was destined to end up in a fiasco. It was in this background that a well known English language news channel called New Delhi Television (NDTV) telecast a programme on May 30, 2007 in which one Sunil Kulkarni was shown meeting with IU Khan, the Special Public Prosecutor and RK Anand, the Senior Defence Counsel (and two others) and negotiating for his sell out in favour of the defence for a very high price. Kulkarni was at one time considered the most valuable witness for the prosecution but afterwards, at an early stage in the trial, he was dropped by the prosecution as one of its witnesses. Nearly eight years later, the trial court had summoned him to appear and give his testimony as a court witness. The telecast came a few weeks after the court order and even as his evidence in the trial was going on. According to NDTV, the programme was based on a clandestine operation carried out by means of a concealed camera with Kulkarni acting as the mole. What appeared in the telecast was outrageous and tended to confirm the cynical but widely held belief that in this country the rich and the mighty enjoyed some kind of