Author: Vedashree B. Rajput, Government Law College, Mumbai
To the Point
Twenty years after former Congress MLA Pawanraje Nimbalkar and his driver Samad Kazi were shot dead near Kalamboli in Navi Mumbai, a special CBI court has acquitted all nine accused, including former NCP leader Padamsinh Patil, long ago named as the alleged mastermind. This case didn’t fail because it was dragged and delayed. It failed because the time wasn’t used to build what the prosecution ultimately needed; a solid corroborative foundation strong enough to support the approver’s testimony. The delay isn’t the story, but what wasn’t constructed during it.
Use of Legal Jargon
To understand why the case fell apart the way it did, a few terms need to be understood.
Accomplice – someone who participated in the crime alongside the accused.
Approver – an accomplice who’s been granted a pardon (under Section 306 of the CrPC, now Section 343 of the BNSS) in exchange for making a complete, truthful disclosure of what happened and testifying against the others involved. The pardon doesn’t erase what they did and it isn’t unconditional. If the approver fails to make a full and true disclosure, the pardon can be cancelled and they can be tried alongside the others. It converts them: accused becomes prosecution witness. When the prosecution turns an accused into an approver, they’re betting that someone who was actually part of the crime can explain what happened better than any outsider ever could. It’s not a bad bet to make, but it comes with a price. Section 133 of the Indian Evidence Act, 1872 now Section 138 of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023 – An accomplice is a competent witness. A conviction isn’t illegal simply because it rests on uncorroborated approver testimony. This is what the statute makes clear.
But this is where it gets tricky. The law says courts mayassume an approver’s word isn’t fully trustworthy, unless other evidence backs up the important details of their statement. The key word is “may,” not “must.” Courts get to choose and because of that choice, lawyers and judges have spent decades arguing over exactly how much backup evidence is “enough.”
Corroboration – means something specific. It isn’t another witness proving approver’s credibility. It’s independent evidence for example, seized call records, forensic findings, documentary proof, physical recoveries, witnesses with no stake in the outcome, etc. that confirms the approver’s version on the points that actually connect the accused to the crime. This term is central to the Nimbalkar judgment.
The phrase that anchors the entire doctrine is this, “corroboration is a rule of prudence, not a rule of law”. Courts have said it consistently for decades. An approver’s testimony is admissible. Conviction on that testimony alone is legally possible. But as a matter of judicial practice, a court has to look for corroboration before taking that step, and if it doesn’t find any evidence, it must explain clearly why conviction is still safe. The rest of this article is about what happens when that prudence has nothing to work with.
The Proof
The facts run in a straight line:
On 3 June 2006, former Congress MLA Pawanraje Nimbalkar and his driver Samad Kazi were shot dead while travelling from Mumbai to Osmanabad, now Dharashiv. This was the CBI’s case put forward as a contract killing, politically motivated, allegedly arranged murder for around ₹30 lakh.
Navi Mumbai Police handled the initial investigation. The Nimbalkar family approached the Bombay High Court. The CBI then took over and Former NCP leader Padamsinh Patil named as the alleged mastermind from early on. He was arrested in 2009 and granted bail the same year. The trial opened in 2011 and continued for over a decade. By the end, around 128 witnesses had been examined.
Recently on 20 June 2026, the special CBI court acquitted all nine accused.
This isn’t a case where the evidence was evenly balanced and the judges had a tough call to make. It’s a case where the investigation made one mistake after another and while any single mistake might not have been enough to sink the case on its own, all of them together were.
Mobile phone records and call logs that could’ve backed up the theory were never seized. Never analysed. In a case built on an alleged contract killing coordinated across political and criminal networks, the trail of calls and messages that should’ve been the backbone of the prosecution’s case was simply never investigated. Witnesses gave different descriptions of the getaway vehicle, and it was never properly traced or recovered. And then there was the 2003 letter — written by Nimbalkar himself, to a District Collector, three years before he was killed, raising concerns about his own safety and naming Patil. The CBI had access to it. The court found it was never properly investigated.
The court didn’t dispute the political rivalry between Nimbalkar and Patil. It acknowledged it fully. Then said, plainly, that proven rivalry between two people isn’t the same as proof of a crime. The approver’s testimony wasn’t reliable enough to stand alone. And when the court looked for something to check that testimony, something to make it believable but there was nothing. Not because the evidence didn’t exist in 2006. Because it was never built into the case.
The reaction came quickly. Nimbalkar’s son, Lok Sabha MP Omraje Nimbalkar, called the verdict “unfortunate” and “surprising”, alleged the news had been “managed,” and confirmed he’d challenge the acquittal before the Bombay High Court and the Supreme Court if needed. Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and Deputy CM Eknath Shinde both weighed in, pressing for a CBI appeal. The agency confirmed it would move to the High Court. 15 years of proceedings, and the legal battle isn’t over.
Abstract
This article uses the 2026 acquittal in the Pawanraje Nimbalkar murder case to examine Indian law on approver testimony, and what happens when the law’s own built-in contradiction runs into a failed investigation.
Section 133 of the IEA (now Section 138 of the BSA) says an accomplice is allowed to testify, and their word, even without any backup can, in principle, be enough to convict. But Illustration (b) to Section 114 (now Illustration (b) to Section 119) lets the courts presume that same testimony may be untrustworthy unless it’s backed up by other evidences which is known as corroboration.
Courts have long settled this contradiction by treating corroboration as a matter of caution, not a strict legal requirement. The Nimbalkar case shows what goes wrong with that approach: when the approver’s account is shaky, and no other evidence was ever built up i.e. call records never seized, the getaway vehicle never traced, the victim’s own warning letter left uninvestigated, then there’s nothing left for caution to act on. The argument here is straightforward: the law worked exactly as it’s meant to. The investigation didn’t.
Case Laws
The judicial framework governing approver testimony has built up across decades, and four decisions do most of the work relevant to the Nimbalkar case.
Sarwan Singh v. State of Punjab (1957) – sets the baseline. An accomplice is allowed to testify under Section 133, that’s not in dispute. But the court held that, as a matter of practice, judges should look for backup evidence on the specific points that actually connect the accused to the crime. Not backup evidence in general. Backup on the points that matter. That’s the standard the Nimbalkar prosecution couldn’t meet.
Kashmira Singh v. State of Madhya Pradesh (1952) – Justice Vivian Bose held that a conviction based only on an approver’s word is legally possible, but only if the court is fully aware it’s taking that risk, and writes down clear reasons for why relying on that testimony is safe in this particular case. The word “consciously”carries the load. What the Nimbalkar judgment shows is this same idea, just working in reverse: the court found it was not safe to rely on the approver’s account, precisely because there was nothing else to check it against. Bose’s rule cuts both ways. Here, it cut decisively against the prosecution.
Bhuboni Sahu v. King (Privy Council) – This adds a rule that matters in this case: one accomplice’s statement can’t be used to back up another accomplice’s statement. The backup evidence has to come from a genuinely separate, independent source. In a case where there was already barely any backup evidence, this rule closes off the one shortcut that might have let a court paper over the gaps. There was no independent source here. The rule simply confirmed what the gaps already showed.
Gopi Chand @ Pappu v. State (NCT of Delhi), 2026 -This is the Supreme Court’s most recent and complete restatement of where the law stands. Backup evidence is still a matter of caution, not a strict requirement. But the Court added a line that explains the Nimbalkar outcome precisely: backup evidence must actually “make the testimony believable”, it’s not enough for it to just exist somewhere alongside the testimony. That one phrase is doing all the work. The call records, the getaway vehicle, the 2003 letter, each one, if it had been properly investigated, might have made the approver’s account believable in exactly the way Gopi Chand requires. None of them were investigated. The test the Supreme Court laid out in 2026 is the same test the special CBI court applied and the prosecution failed it.
Put together, these decisions don’t create a loophole. They create one clear standard, open enough to allow a conviction on an approver’s word alone, but strict enough to demand the court is genuinely convinced before taking that step. The Nimbalkar court wasn’t convinced. The law gave it every reason to say so.
Conclusion
The title asks a question. Justice delayed, justice denied? The honest answer is more uncomfortable than either yes or no.
Delay wasn’t the real reason for this acquittal. Fifteen years of proceedings didn’t doom the prosecution. What doomed it was simpler and far more avoidable. Call records never seized. A vehicle whose description kept changing and was never properly traced. A letter written by the victim himself, naming the alleged mastermind three years before his murder, that sat uninvestigated for two decades. Under the standard the Supreme Court laid out in Gopi Chand, that backup evidence must actually make an approver’s testimony believable, each of those gaps was serious on its own. Together, they were decisive.
What the verdict actually shows is this: the law worked exactly as it’s supposed to. Section 133 allows a conviction based on an approver’s testimony. Illustration (b) to Section 114 tells courts to be cautious. Kashmira Singh requires a court to write down clear reasons before relying on testimony with no backup. The special CBI court followed all of these rules correctly when it found the approver’s account unreliable, with nothing to support it. What failed wasn’t the legal standard. What failed was the investigation, the one thing that was supposed to provide the backup evidence.
The Nimbalkar case isn’t the first one. Long-pending trials collapsing, not because of legal loopholes, but because basic investigative steps were never taken, this is a pattern. Evidence fades. Witnesses turn hostile or pass away. Call records and messages that could’ve anchored a theory get harder to recover with every passing year. The longer a case drags on without solid backup evidence, the more it ends up resting on the one thing that was always the weakest link, an approver standing alone in the witness box, asking the court to simply take his word for it.
FAQS
Q1. What is an approver, and how is it different from an ordinary witness?
An approver is an accused person who’s given a pardon in exchange for telling the full truth about the crime and testifying against the other accused. An ordinary witness just saw what happened; an approver was actually part of it. That’s exactly why their evidence is treated with extra caution, they had a reason to be involved in the crime, which means they also have a reason to shape what they say about it afterward. The law recognises this incentive and builds a safeguard around it.
Q2. Can someone be convicted purely on an approver’s testimony, with no other evidence?
Yes, in principle. Section 133 of the IEA, now Section 138 of the BSA allows it. But courts treat backup evidence as a matter of caution, and the Supreme Court has consistently said a judge must write down clear reasons for finding it safe to convict without it. The law allows it. Judicial practice is careful about it. The Nimbalkar court found it couldn’t even clear that lower bar, not because the law stopped it, but because the approver’s account gave the court no real reason to feel confident.
