‘Provoked hours before death’: Delhi High Court denies man’s anticipatory bail plea citing wife’s dying note, call recordings

What was the case?

• The police station concerned received information that the victim killed herself at Chhatarpur Metro Station in June 2025.
• Subsequently, she was shifted to a hospital but was declared dead.
• During the investigation, the victim’s belongings, such as her shoulder bag, some registers, a college identity card, and a mobile phone, helped to determine her identity.
• A dying note was also recovered from the victim, where she allegedly blamed the accused for compelling her to take her life.
• Subsequently, the investigating officer concerned retrieved the victim’s mobile phone conversation with her husband.
• It was placed on record that these conversations were recorded by the victim on her mobile phone.
• The victim also mentioned these recordings in her note before her death.

Court’s observation: ‘Call recordings suggest provocation’

• The original dying note, as well as the transcript of the audio conversation between the victim and the accused, was placed on record.
• The audio conversation, along with the dying note, suggests that the accused, prima facie, provoked the victim to take her own life.
• The recording of another conversation around that day at 6.33 pm also indicates that the accused kept uttering obscenities against the victim.

• The arguments concerning the proximity of time and the residential proximity do not hold merit in the circumstances of this case.
• The anticipatory bail is denied, considering the fact that the accused is destroying the evidence and even deleted the conversations from his mobile phone.
• The accused is directed to surrender himself before the investigating officer.

Accused’s defence: Victim’s neurological disorder

• Advocate Vikram Pratap Singh, one of the counsels for the petitioner, argued that his client did not provoke the victim to kill herself, and there is no such case at hand.
• There should be a proximity between the death and the alleged provocation for making a case for abetment.
• Singh also submitted that the victim was staying away from the matrimonial home.
• He emphasised that the victim did not initiate any proceedings under the Domestic Violence Act, which suggested that she had no complaint against the accused.
• Singh also mentioned before the court that the victim was suffering from a severe neurological disorder, due to which she killed herself.

State’s plea: Dying note written by victim herself

• On the contrary, Assistant Public Prosecutor Hemant Mehla submitted that the note of the victim, written immediately before her death, was handwritten and was sent for forensic analysis.
• After comparison with the contemporary handwriting of the victim in her diary, it was opined that the dying note was written by the victim herself.
• Mehla also pointed out that the voice sample of the accused has been obtained and sent to the authority concerned for comparison with the audio recording retrieved from the mobile phone of the victim, with the assistance of the investigating officer concerned.

‘Truth sits upon lips of dying person’

In another unrelated case, the Delhi High Court on February 6 set aside the acquittal order of a husband and his sister in a 36-year-old dowry death case, considering the victim’s last note and observing that the “truth sits upon the lips of a dying person” and makes their last utterances “worthy of credit”.

The bench of Justices Subramonium Prasad and Vimal Kumar Yadav was hearing an appeal filed by the state challenging the acquittal order of the accused persons by the trial court in 1998.

Interestingly, the opening lines of the verdict quoted renowned English author William Shakespeare as saying, “Where words are scarce, they are seldom spent in vain, For they breathe truth that breath.”