Doglapan: The Hard Truth about Life and Start-Ups

by Ashneer Grover

Instead, Gopal Subramanium opened with an assertion that caught the attention of the judge: ‘This is the most interesting case of my career,’ he stated with a flourish. He followed this up with an analogy. ‘Sir, a streetside vendor sold you a mango, claiming that it was sweet. You ate the mango and didn’t find it sweet. Will our judicial system allow itself to be clogged by such cases?’ He quickly went on to explain that if the gentleman under question was claiming that he was defrauded, we had to be able to see the property under question to determine if it was indeed a case of fraud. Essentially, he used a technical argument to draw attention to the fact that the police hadn’t preserved the property, the vegetables in this case. Importantly, he was clear that at the level of the Supreme Court, the verdict had to be based on the interpretation of the law and not just on the merit of the case. He was right. To the fact that there was no property, which could prove whether the vegetables were organic and therefore whether defrauding had indeed happened, the judge noted his agreement. The FIR was summarily quashed and the case dismissed.