An Indian judge ruled that whether the relationship was consensual is a question for trial — and granted the overseas defendant protection from arrest, while barring him from leaving the country. Back in the United States, his hospitality properties tell a different story.
New Delhi / Mobile, Alabama — One of India’s senior courts has granted pre-arrest protection to Bhushan Lal Khanna, an American citizen and overseas businessman accused of rape, ruling that the central question in the case — whether his physical relationship with the woman accusing him was consensual, or was obtained through a false promise of marriage — could only be resolved at trial and did not, on its own, justify arresting him.
The ruling came from Justice Anu Malhotra of the High Court of Delhi, one of India’s state-level high courts that rank just below the Supreme Court of India and are roughly comparable in seniority to a U.S. federal appeals court. She issued it on July 11, 2018, after hearing arguments and reserving her decision in April.
It is worth being precise about what this document is. It is an order granting anticipatory bail — a remedy that has no direct American equivalent. In India, a person who fears arrest can ask a court, in advance, to direct that if police do arrest him, he must be released on bail. It is pre-arrest insurance, not an acquittal. The defendant here was never arrested and never convicted; he asked the court for this protection, and the court gave it to him. Every accusation described below is an untested allegation recorded in a bail proceeding.
The Case at a Glance
The case grew out of a criminal complaint registered with the New Ashok Nagar police station in East Delhi in June 2017. In India, that opening complaint is called a First Information Report, or FIR — the document that formally launches a police investigation, loosely comparable to an initial criminal complaint or police report in the United States. This one, numbered 271 of 2017, was filed under Section 376 of the Indian Penal Code, India’s principal criminal code, which defines and punishes rape.
The woman who filed it, a 25-year-old, is identified throughout the proceedings only as “Ms. X.” That anonymization was the court’s own, and it is preserved here; under Indian law it is a crime to publish the identity of a person who alleges a sexual offense. She accused the defendant of having sex with her on the false assurance that he would marry her, and of later abandoning and threatening her.
The defendant took the case to the High Court under the provisions of India’s Code of Criminal Procedure that allow a senior court to grant anticipatory bail and to use its inherent powers — after a lower trial court, called a Sessions Court, had already turned him down. He was represented by Vikas Pahwa, a senior advocate, a special designation India reserves for distinguished courtroom lawyers. A government prosecutor argued for the state, and — unusually by American standards — the accusing woman was separately represented by her own lawyers, giving the hearing a three-sided, adversarial shape.
The Woman’s Account
According to her FIR and a later statement she gave before a magistrate, which under Indian law carries more weight than a statement made only to police, Ms. X first met the defendant in February 2017, when she went to look at an apartment she hoped to rent. At the office of a real-estate group, one of its directors, Alok Vats, introduced her to the defendant and a business associate, and the group pressed her to join them for lunch before showing her the unit.
That night, she said, she received a WhatsApp message from a U.S. phone number. The sender identified himself as “Bhushan from Atlanta” and said he had gotten her number from Vats. What followed, by her account, was a fast-escalating courtship carried on mostly through WhatsApp calls and texts, mixed in with talk about renting one of the defendant’s apartments.
She alleged that on February 13, 2017, he took her to a movie at a mall in Noida, a satellite city near Delhi, where he held her hand and she pulled it away. The next day — Valentine’s Day — she said he gave her a rose and chocolate, told her he was divorced and looking to marry “a girl like her,” and proposed. When she pointed to their wide age gap, she alleged, he dismissed it as ordinary in the United States and then flew back to Atlanta. Over the following weeks, she said, their online relationship deepened, and he promised to return to India, rent a place near her, and help her improve her English, lose weight, and become more independent.
In early March 2017, by her account, she met him at Indira Gandhi International Airport with a bouquet. He then went with her to a wedding, left some belongings in her room, and — on the pretext of hunting for a nearby apartment the two never managed to find — ended up staying with her. From there, she alleged, he moved in, repeatedly had sex with her on the continuing promise of marriage, used her debit card and cash, and arranged to have her passport prepared through his email account.
She further alleged that he gave her various pills, including emergency contraception and tablets he said would help her lose weight, after which she felt sick and dizzy.
The Pregnancy, the Miscarriage, and the Threats
The complaint grew darker in its later passages. Ms. X said that after the defendant returned to the United States, she missed her period; that he texted her a photo of a pregnancy-test kit, which an unknown person then delivered to her; and that the test was positive. She said that when she told him, he reassured her at first but later stopped answering her calls.
She alleged that she then turned to Vats, who advised her not to go to the police, and that she was made to sign an English-language document in exchange for money. She said she later suffered a miscarriage, after which the defendant stopped payment on checks he had written, refused to marry her, and threatened to have her killed if she kept pressing — boasting, according to the FIR, that his money let him “purchase the police, the lawyer and the judge.” She said that in early June 2017 she got calls — from both Vats and the defendant — pushing her to leave Delhi and stay quiet. She filed her complaint anyway, was examined at a government hospital, and the FIR was registered. The order notes that she later declined an internal medical examination, while her sworn statement before the magistrate broadly repeated and expanded on the FIR.
The Defendant’s Version: a “Honey Trap” and an Extortion Scheme
The defendant’s story, as laid out in the ruling, was a near-mirror image of hers — and flipped the roles of victim and predator.
He argued that he was a law-abiding non-resident Indian, the standard term for a person of Indian origin living abroad, with no criminal record, who had been deliberately set up. By his telling, a friend had introduced him to the directors of the real-estate company, and he had wired roughly 70 million rupees into the business in December 2016 in exchange for a 25 percent stake and a seat on its board. India counts large numbers in lakhs and crores — one lakh is 100,000 and one crore is 10 million — so his investment of about 7 crore rupees came to roughly $1.1 million at 2017 exchange rates, when a dollar bought about 65 rupees. Only afterward, he said, did a director introduce him to the woman — described as a company officer — and only then did she begin, in his words, “honey trapping” him as part of a planned scheme.
He contended that the FIR’s own facts undercut the rape charge: the woman had voluntarily picked him up at the airport, brought him to her own home, gone with him to a movie, and carried on the relationship in her own apartment over an extended stretch. He stressed that she knew he was already married and roughly twice her age, which, he argued, made any promise of marriage implausible. His case was that she had pursued and pressured him, then blackmailed him — and that, afraid for his reputation, he had handed over gifts and cash.
In a later sworn statement filed with the court, the defendant disclosed that he is married with a daughter and lives in the Atlanta metropolitan area in the U.S. state of Georgia. He described himself as a real-estate entrepreneur with interests spanning multiple business entities — including a commercial land holding company, a real-estate investment firm, and KNA Hospitality Management LLC, which he said manages, operates, and maintains lodging properties. He also disclosed that lawsuits were pending against him in American courts.
Abandoned Hotels and a City Left Holding the Bill: Mobile, Alabama
While the Indian rape case has unfolded in Delhi’s courtrooms, a parallel story has been playing out in Mobile, Alabama, where Khanna has ties through his hospitality holdings — and where two hotels bearing his company’s brand name have been shut down by court order, left in severe disrepair, and ultimately abandoned, leaving local taxpayers to foot the bill for boarding them up.
The two properties — both operating under the Extend-A-Suites name through the entity Extend-A-Suites Mobile, LLC — once served travelers and long-term residents in the Mobile area. According to reporting by WEAR-TV, Mobile’s NBC affiliate, both properties fell into steep decline, accumulating massive unpaid tax debts and deteriorating to conditions that city officials ultimately deemed unsafe and unfit for human habitation.
The first and larger of the two properties sits on the service road alongside Interstate 65. Court records show the city filed a lien against Extend-A-Suites in March 2023, with the motel owner owing more than $463,635 in business and lodging taxes and penalties for nonpayment. These were not taxes levied on the owner directly, but sales taxes the business had collected from its own guests and simply never forwarded to the city and state. On October 6, 2023, a judge issued a padlock order closing the business.
What followed was a scene that drew widespread attention in Mobile. Residents say they were blindsided by the order — the previous day was the first time many of them knew the building was closing — and they said the owner had continued collecting rent even after the court order to stop doing business on the property. Some residents had just paid hundreds of dollars for rooms they described as roach-infested and without hot water. “We’ve been without hot water for four months,” said one resident. “They knew that this was coming. They told no one. They kept collecting money,” said another.
A judge later stayed the padlock order temporarily to give residents more time to find alternative housing, and the city worked with a local housing nonprofit to connect displaced guests with services. But the reprieve was short-lived. When the city discovered people were still entering the vacant property and causing damage, it launched an emergency effort to secure the building.
It cost nearly $24,000 to secure the dilapidated 115-room hotel — a bill that included seven doors, trash and furniture removal, and cutting the grass. A court order put the owner, Extend-A-Suites Mobile, LLC, on notice that the city intended to recover every dollar of that cost. The owner did not appear at the court hearing. Inside the building at the time, city officials reported finding propane burners — a dangerous discovery in a structure with no power, no heat, and no working fire-detection system.
The second property, located in the Tillman’s Corner community on the western edge of Mobile, fared no better. City inspectors declared the Extend-A-Suites motel there “unfit for human occupancy” in November 2023 — at a time when people were still living inside, with no running water and no electricity. Now the people are gone, the trash has been removed, and all the windows and doors have been boarded up.
The city spent $5,850 securing the Tillman’s Corner site and is now pursuing reimbursement from the property owner through a public hearing and council vote. “The taxpayer paid money for it to happen. So now, the next step will be we’ll go after the cost associated with boarding it up,” said Councilman Ben Reynolds, in whose district the property sits. Reynolds noted that cleaning up one blighted property had not solved the surrounding problems, and that he was fielding near-daily complaints about homelessness and disorder in the Tillman’s Corner area — conditions he linked in part to the hotel’s collapse.
Mobile’s Director of Communications described the owner as “an out-of-state company” and said the city’s goal was to hold all businesses to the same standard while balancing the needs of displaced residents. “We appreciate Housing First working with us to assist the residents being impacted by the actions of this out-of-state company,” she said.
Both properties remain shuttered and deteriorating, their windows sealed with plywood, their parking lots empty — a stark contrast to the hospitality management portfolio the defendant described to the Delhi High Court when arguing that he was a legitimate businessman and an unlikely candidate for arrest.
The Disputed Settlement
A central — and hotly contested — piece of the India case was a written settlement agreement. The defendant said he had agreed, under pressure, to pay Ms. X 3.1 million rupees — about 31 lakh, or roughly $48,000 — and had written a series of post-dated checks to cover it. According to the investigation summary in the ruling, the checks were drawn on RBL Bank and spread across mid-2017; the first, for about 400,000 rupees, or roughly $6,000, was deposited into and withdrawn from the woman’s account. The defendant said he stopped payment on the rest once he learned the FIR had been filed, and alleged that the company’s directors had originally schemed to squeeze as much as 70 million rupees — about $1.1 million — out of him before the matter was “settled” at the lower figure.
The agreement included a nondisclosure clause and came with a sworn affidavit and an indemnity bond, meaning a written promise to cover any future losses or claims, supposedly signed by the woman, along with two named witnesses and a notarization. She, however, told police she had never signed any such deal and had never appeared before a notary, calling the document a forgery manufactured to support his bail request.
Investigators took the dispute seriously. They sent the original agreement, along with sample and known signatures of everyone involved, to a government forensic science laboratory — India’s equivalent of a crime lab — for handwriting analysis, and questioned the vendor who had sold the stamp paper on which it was printed. The police summary noted that the agreement’s witnesses, and a lawyer said to have been present, maintained that the woman had in fact signed it in front of them.
Parallel Cases and the Police’s Own Read
The ruling lays out a tangle of competing legal moves. The defendant had gone to the authorities before the rape complaint against him was filed — complaining to a police station in a neighboring district, writing to the prime minister’s office and senior officials, and petitioning a magistrate to order an investigation. On that magistrate’s direction, a separate criminal case was opened against the woman and others in Noida, on charges including extortion, cheating, forgery, and criminal conspiracy.
A Look Out Circular, a border alert that flags a person to immigration officers so they can be stopped from leaving the country, had been issued against the defendant. Indian police had also begun proceedings to formally declare him a fugitive evading the legal process, though the court noted those were later dropped. He had been granted temporary protection from arrest in December 2017 and had cooperated with the investigation as ordered.
Notably, the police’s own status report stopped far short of backing the prosecution’s theory. After analyzing phone records, confirming the defendant’s large investment in the company, and reviewing the messages between the two, investigators wrote that it “cannot be proved” that he ever promised marriage, that the pair appeared to have lived together in a consensual live-in relationship, and that the “ingredients of criminal conspiracy cannot be ruled out.” The report concluded there were no specific grounds to arrest him and that the case could be wrapped up without taking him into custody.
The Competing Law on “Promise to Marry”
Much of the hearing turned on a thorny and recurring question in Indian law: when does sex on a promise of marriage that is later broken amount to rape, and when is it just a relationship that fell apart?
For the defendant, his lawyer lined up a long series of higher-court decisions for the proposition that breaking a promise to marry is not, by itself, rape, and that a woman in that situation should generally be left to sue in civil court. Many of the cited cases involved educated adult women in lengthy, voluntary relationships, where courts had granted bail or found the encounters consensual. The defense also leaned on the Supreme Court of India’s framework for anticipatory bail, which tells judges to weigh the seriousness of the accusation, the defendant’s record, the risk of flight, the chance of evidence-tampering, and the genuineness of the prosecution — and which treats arrest as a last resort.
For the woman, her lawyers relied on the opposing line of cases holding that when a man never intended to marry from the start and used the promise as a tool to obtain sex, the woman’s consent is void because it rests on a misunderstanding of the facts. They argued the defendant had wowed her with displays of wealth — photos of expensive cars and possessions — to win her trust, and warned that, as an American citizen with family abroad, he would flee or pressure witnesses if released.
The Court’s Reasoning
Justice Malhotra threaded carefully between these positions, repeatedly stressing that a bail court forms only a prima facie view — a first-look, surface assessment — and does not decide guilt.
She gave weight to several features of the record. The defendant was already a married man with children. The woman was 25 and, in the court’s assessment, educated and not appearing to be naive or gullible. By her own account, the two had lived together in her room for several weeks. Photographs the woman herself submitted showed the pair together — with a bouquet, and standing close at a wedding — and the WhatsApp transcripts on file reflected, in the court’s words, “the development of a relationship” and mutual concern.
The judge drew a sharp contrast with a Supreme Court case the woman had cited, in which the accuser was 16 and described as unworldly; here, by contrast, the accuser was an adult who did not appear naive. Malhotra also noted that the woman had chosen to cash the roughly $6,000 check and was recorded — by the agreement’s witnesses, if not in her own words — as having signed the settlement.
On all of it, her conclusion was deliberately tentative: whether the relationship reflected genuine consent or an inducement to marry, and whether the woman knew the defendant was married, were “matters which can only be determined on trial.” That very uncertainty, the court reasoned, weighed in favor of granting pre-arrest protection rather than ordering custody.
The Decision and Its Conditions
Finding that locking the defendant up for questioning was not warranted, the court ruled that if he were arrested, he must be released on anticipatory bail after posting a personal bond of about 500,000 rupees — roughly $7,700 — backed by two financial guarantors.
The protection came tightly fenced. He was ordered not to tamper with evidence, not to threaten witnesses — directly or through anyone else — and, crucially, not to leave the city or the country until the investigation was finished and the charge sheet filed. A charge sheet is the final police report formally setting out the charges, the closest Indian counterpart to a U.S. indictment. Any future travel by the defendant, as a non-resident Indian, was made conditional on getting advance permission from the trial court. With those conditions in place, the court closed out the application on July 11, 2018.
What It Means
For the defendant, the order lifted the immediate threat of arrest but left the criminal case fully alive — anticipatory bail freezes the prospect of jail; it does not clear anyone. For the woman, the ruling underscored a hard reality in this category of cases: that an adult, educated woman’s long, documented relationship will count heavily, at the bail stage, against a later claim that her consent was never real. And for the larger debate in India over both the misuse and the legitimate use of rape law in failed relationships, the decision is one more entry in a body of law the courts themselves keep describing as resistant to any one-size-fits-all rule.
The two dueling cases — the rape complaint in Delhi and the extortion-and-forgery case in Noida — were both still under investigation when the order came down, with the forensic analysis of the disputed settlement not yet back. Meanwhile, thousands of miles away in Mobile, two boarded-up hotels stand as a separate testament to the kinds of legal and financial disputes that have followed Bhushan Lal Khanna across three states and two continents.
Whatever the truth of the rival stories told in Delhi’s High Court, that truth, as Justice Malhotra kept repeating, was a question reserved for trial.