Mumbai court grants pre-arrest bail to four trustees of Mahim temple

Arrest has far reaching consequences, not only to the person arrested but his whole family, the Mumbai sessions court observed, while granting bail to four trustees of Dadoba Jagannath Religious Charitable Trust at Mahim

Arrest has far reaching consequences, not only to the person arrested but his whole family, the Mumbai sessions court observed, while granting bail to four trustees of Dadoba Jagannath Religious Charitable Trust at Mahim.

Arrest has far reaching consequences, not only to the person arrested but his whole family, the Mumbai sessions court observed, while granting bail to four trustees of Dadoba Jagannath Religious Charitable Trust at Mahim (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

“Certainly the image of arrested person gets tarnished particularly when the persons like present applicants who are ailing and very old and have not a single criminal antecedent throughout their life,” said additional sessions judge MG Deshpanade, referring to the fact that one of the trustees was aged 91 years and two others were aged 88 and 78 respectively

The accused —Jaywant Desai, Padmakar Sahani, Sanjeev Paralkar and Shaila Pathare — had approached the court for anticipatory bail, apprehending arrest in connection with a case registered by Mahim police station. The case is based on complaint lodged by one Prabhakar Thakur, who alleged that the trustees misappropriated some old stone idols from the Heritage II category temple of the trust. He said the trustees changed the old idols, saying those were eroded and despite pursuing long with them, they did not inform him as to where those old idols had gone. Therefore he lodged a complaint on July 5, 2019, with the Mahim police station.

The police in turn had requested the office of the charity commissioner to look into the matter. Accordingly, the charity inspector carried out an inquiry and found that the idols of Parvati Mata and Mata Shitaladevi had been kept at Madh, at the farmhouse of the trust chairman, Ganpati Bhatte, and Sanjiv Paralkar had secretly brought them back and kept them in the office behind the temple. Inspection of the idols had revealed that there was no erosion. The FIR alleged that the trustees had misappropriated two more old idols.

However, advocates Rajan Shirodkar and Nihar Ghag, who represented the trustees, submitted that the FIR was an outcome of a tenancy dispute between the trust and the complainant, a tenant. Main reason for lodging the complaint was the notice issued by the trust on April 16, 2019 to the informant’s mother for vacating a tenant godown, owned by the trust.

The court accepted their contentions. “The conduct of informant prima-facie speaks volumes. In my opinion all that has been agitated is nothing but tenancy dispute given the colour of criminal prosecution,” said the court while granting pre-arrest bail to the trustees.