It was 15 July 2006. Francisco Xavier ‘Mickky’ Pacheco was Minister for Agriculture and Animal Husbandry. He summoned Electricity Junior Engineer Kapil Natekar to his office because the JE had, allegedly, not responded to a call made by the minister’s PA the previous day. Mr Natekar was accompanied by a driver, Jose D’Costa, and fellow engineer Victor Barbosa. But they were asked to wait outside the office, while the JE went in to meet Pacheco. When Natekar came out of Mr Pacheco’s office, he was in tears and had a reddish mark on his right eye. Both Mr D’Costa and Mr Barbosa had also heard sounds of shouting from the office while Mr Natekar was inside.
The slap that caused the red mark on Junior Engineer Kapil Natekar’s face may haunt Minister for Rural Development Agency Mickky Pacheco for the rest of his life. Or at least for the six months that he will have to spend in jail. Now that the Supreme Court has dismissed the appeal against his sentence, all that remains between him and the jail is a revision plea. Unless he has very strong grounds, say legal experts, it is unlikely to be successful. But it will buy him some time, and give Chief Minister Laxmikant Parsekar plenty of leisure to study the SC order before deciding whether Mr Pacheco should resign from the Ministry.
It takes a great deal of courage for a government servant to take on a minister, or even an ex-minister. Kapil Natekar and his colleagues Jose D’Costa and Victor Barbosa must have had to stand up to a great deal of pressure when he filed the FIR and, later, when they had to give evidence before the trial court. But thanks to their fortitude, any politician in Goa will think twice, if not thrice, before he decides to get violent with cops or government servants.
On 27 April 2011, JMFC Margao D M Kerkar held Mr Pacheco guilty of assaulting a public servant and sentenced him to simple imprisonment for one year with a fine of Rs 5,000. He appealed before South Goa Assistant Sessions Judge Irshad Aga who, on 5 October 2011, upheld the conviction but reduced the imprisonment to six months and the fine to Rs1,500. Mr Pacheco once more challenged the order before Additional Sessions Judge Vijaya Pol, who released him on ‘admonition’ that he should act like a proper public servant. Adv Aires Rodrigues and Sudip Tamhankar filed criminal applications against this order, on which the High Court took up a suo moto writ petition. Mr Justice A R Joshi’s order restored the six month jail term. Mr Pacheco then appealed against the High Court order in the Supreme Court. The rest is history, or soon will be.
In this country, politicians get away with assault only too often. Take the case of West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s two nephews. One slapped a policeman who stopped him from driving on the wrong side of the road. He would have got away, had it not been for the media reporting widely on the incident. The other nephew was slapped by an engineering student during a rally. Badly beaten by TMC activists, the student ended up in hospital with a severely bleeding head. Yet, he was charged with attempted murder, not those who beat him up.
In Mumbai, a policeman who stopped an MLA’s car for speeding on the Bandra-Worli Sealink was summoned to the Legislative Assembly. There, in the Assembly premises itself, he was badly beaten up by a group of MLAs and had to be admitted to hospital. But it was the policeman who got suspended, after a House Committee concluded that his injuries were ‘minor’. The MLAs went scot-free.
Mr Pacheco has a long litany of cases against him, but none of them has stuck. In 2002, he allegedly assaulted the driver of a Kadamba bus, because he wouldn’t let Mr Pacheco’s car overtake. In 2009, a traffic cop complained that the minister had abused and threatened him in Margao. The same year, the management of a land-based casino accused Pacheco of extorting money and assaulting a casino dealer.
In 2010, Mr Pacheco was booked for abetment to suicide of his friend Nadia Torrado, but the case was eventually dropped. The same year, he was probed by the US government for allegedly running an immigration and money laundering racket. Mr Pacheco said that the candidates he recruited for jobs abroad used to send money back home to their families via his bank account, which caused the confusion.
This time too, he might have got away. But the higher judiciary has made sure that that he will have to pay the price.
