Lessons From The Aryan Khan Case

The inside story of why he was freed and how the narcotic law needs to be amended to prevent persecution

- Raj Chengappa

If there was a turning point in the Aryan Khan case, it came on November 12 last year, on his 24th birthday. Aryan, the eldest son of Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan, had been summoned that day for questioning by the Special Investigation Team (SIT) of the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB). The SIT had been formed to conduct an independent probe of the charges of possession and consumption of illicit drugs against Aryan and 19 others—a case prepared by the NCB’s zonal directorate, then headed by the flamboyant Sameer Wankhede.

A month earlier, Wankhede had led the raid that resulted in the sensational arrest of Khan when he and five friends were boarding cruise ship Cordelia at the Mumbai port on October 2. The NCB zonal team claimed that they had seized a substantial quantity of illicit drugs from them and others who were to board the cruise ship and that Aryan had links with an international drugs syndicate. Had the charges been proven, punishment for Khan under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act, 1985, could have ranged from six months to 20 years of rigorous imprisonment.

However, as Wankhede waded into a series of controversies involving his own probity as well procedural lapses in the conduct of the Aryan Khan case, NCB chief S.N. Pradhan decided he needed an independent probe to ascertain the truth. “The Wankhede saga,” he says, “was overtaking the Aryan Khan one and, in both cases, the NCB’s reputation was at stake. So, I decided to form an SIT to go into the Aryan case apart from initiating a special vigilance enquiry into the allegations against Wankhede.”