- (1.) A. B. Srivastava, J. Learned counsel for the applicant and the learned counsel for the respondent have been heard.
(2.) APPLICANT Mangal Singh, accused in a case under Section 302/452, I. P. C. under investigation at Police Station Babar-district Banda, has applied for bail. The allegation is the relations between the deceased Patrakhan Singh, the Mangal Singh and his father non-applicant accused Balbir Singh were strained in connection with voting on the no confidence motion against Balbir Singh, who is the village Pradhan. On 22-3-1993, at 5. 30 p. m. , both the accused persons, armed with guns accosted deceased Patrakhan at his houseand applicant Mangal Singh fired a shot with his gun resulting into his instantaneous death. The post-mortem examination report and the statements of eye withesses fully corroborate the version in the F. I. R. On behalf of the accused-applicant, the incident is stated to be of late hour of night, which, however, is belied by the medical evidence. Yet another plea of the applicant is, that the F. I. R. in this case is a dubious documentand it having come in exist much later than stated by the prosecution, the applicant is entitled to bail. This plea also appears to be without substance, reliance in this regard is placed on the fact that in the inquest memo the distance of the place of occurrence from the Police Station is mentioned as 12 Kilometres, whereas, in the chik it is 16 kilometres. Reliance, in this regard, has been place in Jagdeo Singh v. State, 1979 Crl LJ 236; Manohar v. O. State, (1983) 20 ACC 64 and Shyama Charan and others v. State of V. P. (1984) 2 Crimes 782.
(3.) IN Tunda and another v. State, 1990 Cri LJ 868, on the other hand, the view taken by a Division Bench of this Court based on the proposition laid down by the Supreme Court in Podda Narayana and others v. State of Andhra Pradesh, AIR 1975 SC 1252and the prescribed form of inquest report, is to effect that under no provision of the law and even as a matter of practice, is the officer conducting inquest, required to write down in the relevant column the distance from the Thana by (sic) it out from the first information report, although at times it may be ditferent from what his own impression about it is. He is not called upon to copy out this fact from the F. I. R. The mere fact that there is a discrepancy in the distance from the police station to the place of occurrence, as given in the first information report and the inquest memo, will not by itself sufficient to claim that the first information report should be discarded as ante-timed. IN most of the cases, the officer conducting the inquest has his own impression about the distance. IN some cases he may note down the distance as given in the F. I. R. but in no case, his action in this respect can result in the conclusion that either the inquest memo is fake, or the first information report is ante-timed, unless there are other circumstances to justify such a conclusion. In Haridwar Singh and others v. State of U. P. 1993 UP Crr 545, cited on behalf of the applicant, also the F. I. R. was held not to have been actually recorded as mentioned therein, on a cumulative effect of various circumstances, one of which was, the difference in the distance noted in the inquest report and the F. I. R.;