Supreme Court on Monday awarded jail term to Vikas Yadav and cousin Vishal Yadav for their role in the kidnapping and killing of Nitish Katara in 2002 but reduced their jail term from 30 years to 25 years. The victim’s mother Neelam Katara termed the verdict as her “biggest victory”.
Rejecting plea of Vikas Yadav, son of dreaded politician DP Yadav, that Delhi HC had power to quantify life sentence as 25 years, a bench comprising justices Dipak Misra and C. Nagappan said, “Punishments for Vikas Yadav and Sukhdev Pehlwan will run concurrently and not consecutively as ordered by the Delhi High Court.”
The court said both the jail terms would run concurrently that would effectively lead to the award of 25 years of imprisonment to the Yadavs. Simultaneously, Pehalwan, who was granted 25-year jail term in the case by the high court, will now have to face 20-year imprisonment in the matter.
The order came on the appeals filed by Vikas and Vishal against the Delhi high court order which had enhanced the life term to 25 years in jail without remission and an additional five years for destruction of evidence in the case, terming Katara’s murder as “honour killing”.
The Yadavs’ acquaintance Sukhdev Yadav alias Pehelwan was then awarded an enhanced life sentence of 25 years without remission by the high court which had held that the crime fell in “rarest of rare category”, but saved them from the gallows saying possibility of their reformation and rehabilitation was not “unforseeably foreclosed”.
The Supreme Court had on August 17, 2015, upheld the conviction of Vikas, Vishal and Sukhdev, saying “only criminals are crying for justice” in this country.
Earlier, the high court had held that the murder of Katara, who was in love with Vikas’s sister, was an “honour killing” which was done in a “very carefully planned and premeditated” manner with “extreme vengeance”.
“If you see quantum of the punishment, we had asked for death penalty and five years have been reduced quantitatively. It is not any shoe or slipper we are talking about here but the body of my son which was destroyed, so even if I demand 10 more years of imprisonment for him, it should not be a big deal. It is justified,” she told reporters.
Neelam Katara, who has battled hard for justice, however, said she was satisfied that the court had upheld many more years of punishment for her son’s killers than the 14 years usually awarded in a life sentence.
“Qualitatively I am happy that the Supreme Court has not taken it as just another murder case as it wasn’t a normal murder but a well planned case of honour killing by power drunk rich people and thus 14-years of life imprisonment was not awarded by the SC.
