Three years ago, when former British Naval officer and accused paedophile Duncan Alexander Grant had surrendered before Mumbai’s Colaba police after landing in the city on a flight from Dar Es Salem in Tanzania, child rights activists had hailed it as a major victory and the news had made international headlines.The Maharashtra police had already extradited Grant’s alleged accomplice Alan John Waters, also a former Royal Navy officer, from the US, and getting Grant was seen as a big breakthrough.Their elation rose when a lower court convicted the two Britons as well as their alleged Indian accomplice in 2006 and sentenced the British nationals to six years of rigorous imprisonment while the Indian got three years for sexually abusing children at a shelter house they ran in Mumbai.As a result, the Bombay High Court verdict on Wednesday acquitting the three men for want of sufficient evidence has come as a rude jolt.“I have surrendered because I did not want to stay away when my friend (Waters) was being tried. We are innocent and we have full faith that we’ll get justice,” Grant had told The Indian Express then.His “belief” was paid off on Wednesday when the Bombay High Court acquittal them of all charges of sexual abuse of children. It was their contention that the whole issue was orchestrated by two men, Alan Dennings and Shridhar Naik, to gain control of their shelters.The shaken child rights activists and their lawyers believe no paedophile is ever going to get convicted in India.The court ruled that the testimonies of the victims did not carry weight since the same were omitted while these were recorded before the police. The high court has held that if the statements which were not recorded by the police are not included, then there is no case.Although the prosecution had nine witnesses, testimonies of only two were recorded. The two testified that some of them were subjected to fellatio and other activities by Grant and Waters. They said that even the friends of the accused abused them on a continuous basis between 1995-2001.The court observed that the victims did not complain all these years and it was too improbable because there were 40-50 children in the shelter.However, Child Line India Foundation Lawyer Yug Mohit Chaudhry thinks otherwise. “There could not have been a stronger case than this,” Chaudhry said.An example from GoaArguably India’s most notorious case of paedophile conviction, the Freddy Peats scandal first came to light after a police raid on his shelter in South Goa in the early 1990s. His den was said to be a hotbed for European paedophiles for nearly 20 years. Peats, an Indian passport holder of Anglo-German descent, ran a shelter home, Gurukul Orphamily, and was popular among the poor children there.Peats’s luck ran out when a little boy complained about his activities to his father. A subsequent raid at Peats’s residence in April 1991 unearthed an international sex racket that had been running for over two decades. The police found pornographic photos of minor boys engaged in sexual acts with elderly white men along with syringes and narcotics.He was charged with forcing boys into homosexual activities and for possessing drugs and pornographic material. Investigations revealed that young boys were forced into unnatural activities, especially for German tourists.The Sessions Court expedited the case only after Mumbai-based child rights activist, Sheela Barse, filed a writ petition in the high court in 1995, urging for a daily trial. He was then sentenced to life imprisonment on March 21, 1996. The HC later upheld the conviction. He died in April 2005 at the age of 81.
