Hotel Servant Not in Conscious Possession of Master's Opium: Supreme Court Sets Aside NDPS Conviction

On secret information, the District Opium Officer recovered 2.1 kg of opium from a room adjoining the kitchen of a roadside hotel where the appellant worked as a servant (para 2). Officers of the Central Bureau of Narcotics recorded two statements in which he said he had brought the opium to the hotel from the owner's house at his direction, and that opium tablets were sold to truck drivers (para 2). Relying on these confessions, the trial court convicted him under Section 8 read with Section 18 and sentenced him to ten years' rigorous imprisonment and a fine of Rs. 1 lakh; the High Court affirmed (para 4). He retracted the confessions only in his Section 313 statement (para 13).

Section 53 lets officers be invested with the powers of an officer in charge of a police station, but that does not make Central Bureau of Narcotics officers police officers under Sections 25 and 26 of the Evidence Act, because they cannot submit a report under Section 173 CrPC and must lay a complaint (para 8). Following Raj Kumar Karwal and Kanhaiyalal, their confessions were held admissible (paras 8-10). A voluntary, truthful and reliable confession is "an efficacious piece of evidence"; corroboration is a rule of prudence, and a conviction can rest solely on a Section 67 confession (para 12). As the appellant never complained when produced before the Special Judge and retracted only under Section 313, the confessions were voluntary (para 13). But possession "has to be conscious", and no one said he sold the opium (para 15). "A servant of a hotel, in our opinion, cannot be said to be in possession of contraband belonging to his master unless it is proved that it was left in his custody over which he had absolute control." (para 15). Nothing showed he occupied the room, and title to the opium vested in the hotel's owners (para 15).