RAM AVTAR Vs. STATE DELHI ADMINISTRATION

JUDGEMENT

(1.) The appellant in this case was convicted under S. 302 IPC and sentenced to imprisonment for life by the High Court. The case depends purely on circumstantial evidence and the trial Court after considering the evidence was of the opinion that the prosecution case was not proved beyond reasonable doubt and. accordingly acquitted the appellant of the charges framed against him. The State filed an appeal before the High Court which reversed the decision of the trial Court and came to the conclusion that the appellant had killed his wife by strangulation. Hence, this appeal before this Court under S. 379 of the Cr. P.C., 1973.

(2.) At the very outset we might mention that circumstantial evidence must be complete and conclusive before accused can be convicted thereon. This, however, does not mean that there is any particular or special method of proof of circumstantial evidence. We must, however, guard against the danger of not considering circumstantial evidence in its proper perspective, e.g. where there is a chain of circumstances linked up with one another, it is not possible for the court to truncate and break the chain of circumstances. In other words where a series of circumstances are dependent on one another they should be read as one integrated whole and riot considered separately, otherwise the very concept of proof of circumstantial evidence would be defeated. The learned Sessions Judge seems to have fallen into this very error. In the instant case, instead of taking all the circumstances together, which are undoubtedly circumstantial and closely linked up with one another, the learned Sessions Judge has completely misdirected himself by separately dealing with each circumstance thereby making a wrong approach while appreciating the circumstantial evidence produced in the case.

(3.) Let us now recount the circumstances relied upon by the appellant by giving first a brief summary of the same. The marriage of the accused and the deceased took place on Dec. 6, 1975, i.e. hardly a year before the date of the occurrence. After about six months of the marriage, the relations between the two spouses started becoming strained. The evidence clearly shows that the accused neglected the deceased, abused her, teased her, vaxed her and even beat her. All these things were reported to the relatives of both sides as a result of which a panchayat had to be called to bring the two parties together which also was of no avail. There is further evidence to show that on the night of the occurrence, i.e. between the night of 16th and 17th Nov. 1976, the accused was last seen by some of the witnesses to whose evidence we shall refer hereafter. Secondly, it is also proved that the accused left his house in the morning of 17th Nov. 1976 and went to Muzaffar Nagar and stayed at his sister's house there and came back to Delhi in the evening of 17th Nov. 1976 but instead of staying in his own house he stayed in Venus Hotel in Paharganj in Delhi under a false and assumed name of Vinod Kumar which, according to the evidence, was written by him while making the entries in the Hotel register.