SC to hear plea against Peepli Live director’s acquittal

Mahmood Farooqui

The Supreme Court will, on Friday, hear a plea by a US-based researcher challenging the acquittal of Peepli Live co-director Mahmood Farooqui by the Delhi High Court in a rape case. Challenging the verdict, the complainant said that the High Court had erred in acquitting the filmmaker in the case and there was sufficient evidence against him. The case will now come up for hearing before a bench of Justice S A Bobde and Justice L Nageswar Rao. The Delhi High Court had, in September last year, acquitted Farooqui by giving him the “benefit of the doubt”.

In doing so, the High Court had set aside a trial court order sentencing him to seven years in jail for the alleged offence. “It remains in doubt whether such an incident, as has been narrated… took place, and if at all it had taken place, it was without the consent/will of the prosecutrix (the woman), and if it was without the consent. whether the appellant (Farooqui) could discern/understand the same,” Justice Ashutosh Kumar had said while acquitting Farooqui. The judgment had also stated that “No” might not always mean no and that there were examples of “woman’s behavior (where)… a feeble ‘no’ may mean a ‘yes’,” in cases of past intimacy.

An FIR had been registered against Farooqui on June 19, 2015 based on the complaint of the woman, a research scholar from a US-based university, following which he was arrested. She had alleged that Farooqui had raped her on March 28, 2015, at his Sukhdev Vihar residence. The trial in the case began on September 9, 2015 and Farooqui was convicted of rape on July 30, 2016. He then filed an appeal in the High Court against the order.

The trial court said that the testimony of the woman was “truthful and credible and can be relied upon as being of sterling worth for the purpose of conviction of the accused”.