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“Every false complaint of sexual offences not just causes immense damage to the person accused of the offence, but also creates cynicism and distrust across the society, which leads to even the genuine victims of sexual offences suffer, as society starts suspecting her truthful complaint also to be false.”
“Quite often, it is seen that road rage leads to loss of human lives as well. The damage caused gets aggrandized when one of the aggressors is a lawyer while the other is a President of a political organization.”
Even after assuming, that such relationship existed between petitioner and his sister-in-law, or demeaning language in reference to the deceased, was exchanged via WhatsApp between them, these facts, stand alone, do not, prima facie, disclose the specific ingredients of cruelty or harassment related to dowry demand.
The Court stated that despite having example of Mahabharata to demonstrate the consequence of absurdity of treating of a woman as a chattel, the misogynistic mindset of our society understood this only when the Supreme Court declared Section 497 of Penal Code, 1860 as unconstitutional in Joseph Shine v. Union of India, (2018) 2 SCC 189.
The expression “soon before her death” in Section 304-B of Penal Code, 1860 must be read as an expression of continuity of time and not an expression of mere length of time. The legislature in its wisdom had used the phrase as “soon before” and not “immediately before”.
Despite having multiple opportunities to report the alleged acts, complainant remained silent. Her complaint came only after the pregnancy was discovered. The Court stated that these facts lend credence to the possibility that the FIR was a reaction to social pressure and the nature of the relationship was re-cast retrospectively to explain an unwanted pregnancy.
Such matters are now filed in the heat of the moment on advice of counsel by exaggerating and misconstruing actual events. However, this does not mean that genuine cases of harassment didn’t exist, and it is not blind to the ground reality of the deeply rooted social evil of greed for dowry.
Mahesh Langa is a senior journalist who is working for The Hindu as the Joint Editor. He is currently embroiled in controversy regarding an alleged GST fraud case.
The Institute of Constitutional and Parliamentary Studies organised the two-day training programme on New Criminal Laws for Officials of Ministries, Lok Sabha, Rajya Sabha and Legislative Assemblies.
“Persons who indulge in forgery and fabrication, especially, in respect of documentary evidence which relied upon heavily that too in order to obtain an ex-parte inunction cannot be allowed to go scot-free.”