‘No one risks daughter’s dignity to settle 30-year-old score’: Punjab and Haryana High Court rejects POCSO convict’s plea

The court stated that considering the tender age of both prosecutrices and the trauma they might have suffered from the alleged occurrence, the delay in lodging the First Information Report (FIR) is plausibly explained and does not adversely affect the prosecution’s version.

While dismissing the defence contention of the absence of “fresh injury marks” in the survivor’s Medico-Legal Report (MLR), the order noted that mere absence of fresh injury marks on the body of the survivor at the time of her medico-legal examination, by itself, cannot be construed to be a decisive factor to negate the allegations levelled against the appellant in this case and to record his acquittal because, as mentioned earlier, both the survivors were 7-8 years old at the relevant time.

The high court stated that the survivors, aged 7 and 8, could not be expected to resist the assault by the appellant, a hale and hearty 38-year-old adult.

POCSO case and conviction

• The prosecution’s case originated from an incident on June 15, 2015, in Kurukshetra district, Haryana.
• The appellant was accused of luring two minor girls, aged seven and eight, and who are neighbours, into his home, where he confined them, threatened them with a knife, and allegedly sexually assaulted one of them.
• The trial court had previously found the accused guilty of several offenses and awarded him concurrent sentences: 14 years rigorous imprisonment and a Rs 10,000 fine under Section 6; 10 years rigorous imprisonment under Section 6, read with Section 18 (for the attempt to assault the second victim) of the POCSO Act, and sentences under Section 506 (criminal intimidation) and Section 342 (wrongful confinement) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).

• The appellant’s counsel argued that a four-day delay in lodging the FIR made the prosecution’s case doubtful. The incident was on June 15, 2015 and the FIR was lodged on June 19.
• He further argued that the absence of fresh injury marks on the child’s body, by itself, falsifies/belies the prosecution’s version regarding her having been raped by the appellant.
• He stated that the complainant’s family members had been nurturing a grudge against the appellant due to a previous dispute and falsely involved him in this case to settle scores.

‘No one holds a grudge for 3 decades…’

• The contention regarding the delay in lodging the FIR does not hold any water, because we cannot lose sight of the fact that one survivor was aged about seven years old, and the other was also around eight years old at the time of the incident.
• The mother deposed that her daughter did not take meals for two days and was under great mental stress, and had disclosed the matter to her on being repeatedly asked.
• They had visited the police station, but the police officers told them to bring a written application, following which their neighbour wrote the application and she gave the same to the police after signing it.

• The survivors specifically deposed during their cross-examination that there was no quarrel between their parents and the appellant, nor had they seen any fight between them at any point in time before the alleged incident.
• Even otherwise, the date of institution of the complaint related to the land dispute was 1981, and the matter was decided in 1982, whereas the latest FIR had been registered in 2015, i.e., after approximately 33-34 years.
• It does not stand the test of logic that any person would continue to nurture any grudge against someone and would wait for such a long time to get that person falsely implicated out of revenge.
• Even if, for the sake of argument, it is presumed that there was any such enmity between them, even then the fact remains that the appellant has not been able to advance any convincing explanation as to the allegations as levelled by the survivor against him in this case.