Fame has a name and a price tag, especially when one is considered to not be part of the ruling establishment as many have experienced during the decade. This is what Shah Rukh Khan’s son Aryan is experiencing after being arrested on October 3 in connection with the Mumbai cruise drugs case. Aryan Khan has been in jail since the Narcotics Control Bureau found drugs on a cruise ship in Mumbai on October 2. Under the charge of a zonal director Sameer Wankhede, the NCB’s Mumbai unit raided a cruise ship off the city coast whose passengers included Aryan Khan and other well known names of Bollywood. On board the ship, NCB officials began a search and the same night and reportedly seized various illegal drugs such as cocaine, charas, and MDMA from the ship and detained seven to eight people, including Aryan Khan along with several others. They were accused of consumption and ‘conspiracy’, among other charges. However, all the accused were given a clean chit as per the report of the Forensic Laboratory, since no evidence was found that they had consumed drugs. Since October 3, Aryan Khan has been doing the rounds of courts in Mumbai seeking bail. Aryan Khan remains imprisoned at Mumbai’s Arthur Road Jail after a special drugs court rejected his bail application. The reason why the NCB opposed the bail plea was reportedly because Aryan’s WhatsApp contained evidence of his involvement with consumption of drugs. The Aryan Khan case highlights the controversial and sometimes dubious means utilised by central probe agencies to “fix someone.” If the Forensic Laboratory concluded that there was no evidence of drug use by the accused, then why did the NCB not take cognisance of it? Being a central probe agency, the NCB is expected to go by the book especially on forensic evidence. Strangely the NCB instead relied only on the WhatsApp chats in Aryan’s mobile as “evidence” that he had consumed drugs. So much so that the bureau has assumed what Aryan’s lawyer said were chats about football, was in reality his admittance to smuggling drugs in ‘bulk quantities’. By desperately clinging on to the WhatsApp chats as evidence and ignoring the clean chit given by the Forensic Laboratory, the NCB under Wankhede, appears to be rewriting crime investigation. According to the arrest memo, Aryan Khan was placed under arrest for “involvement in consumption, sale and purchase” of contraband. By then, the NCB had claimed to have seized 13 grams of cocaine, 5 grams of MD, 21 grams of charas, 22 pills of MDMA (ecstasy) and Rs 1.33 lakh in cash during the raid on Cordelia Cruises’ ship. According to NCB officials, Aryan’s case is a serious offence and so insist they are serious about tackling the drug menace on a war footing. If that is true then people in India want to know what happened to the recent monumental drug haul at the Mundra port in Gujarat? On September 13, the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence and the Customs Department had seized around 3000 kgs of heroin worth an estimated Rs 21,000 crore from two containers at Gujarat’s Mundra Port. The NCB has taken over the case. People want to know what was done with the confiscated drugs?; was the entire consignment burnt?; or just a small part of it? Most importantly, what about those big fishes who are involved , are they being held like Aryan Khan?
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