The Bombay High Court on Tuesday quashed an FIR and further legal proceedings against a man, who was accused by his former wife of rape, unnatural offences and threats in 2016.
“The complaint was filed out of malice by the woman”, the court pronounced while delivering its order.
Advocate Subhash Jha appearing for the accused submitted that the FIR was false and lodged out of vendetta.
Jha submitted that the two stayed together for several years and had six children. “Thus, the relationship was consensual in nature and a sou-motu offence of rape was made up. It would be an abuse of process of law to continue the proceedings against the man”, he submitted.
As per the statements made during the hearing of the case in the court, the two got married on May 12, 1991, as per Muslim laws. The woman shifted to the joint family of the man and they had six children.
However, the relationship between the two deteriorated and the woman alleged that the man subjected her to sexual relations without her consent and also indulged in unnatural acts. She claimed that when she protested, she was assaulted and intimidated.
The woman further claimed that in 2016 she was legally divorced from the man but, since the two were living under the same roof, the man had allegedly again made sexual advances which the woman had recorded and produced it in court to support her case.
The FIR was registered at Agripada police station in Mumbai while the proceedings were going on at the Mazgaon Magistrate court.
The statements further said that when the woman had declared that she did not want to stay with the man any longer, the family members sat together to ascertain the reason for this separation.
During the family meet, the man alleged that the woman was in an illicit relationship with another person.
He downloaded phone recording software from her cell phone and revealed that the woman used to have ‘obscene conversations’ with the person she was in a relationship with.
When the family members confronted her, it is alleged that the woman accepted that she wanted to separate from her husband as she wanted to be with her boyfriend.
After going through the facts of the case, the bench of Justices PD Naik and NR Borkar said that the “factual matrix of this case would indicate that the complaint was filed out of malice.” The bench noted statements of the couple’s son and daughter that had been recorded in the case.
Looking through these statements of the woman’s adult children the bench said that “from the documents on record it can be seen that the FIR has been lodged with malafide intention to implicate the man in the crime. It is out of vendetta.”
“The man and woman stayed together as husband and wife for 23 years. The alleged incident had occurred while they were residing in the same premises. The proceeding suffers from malafide and deserves to be quashed,” the court added.
The bench thus said that continuation of impugned proceedings against the man would be an abuse of the process of law and hence, are required to be quashed.
Source Agencies
