LAWS(MEGH)-2023-4-13

JULIUS KITBOK DORPHANG Vs. STATE OF MEGHALAYA

Decided On April 05, 2023
Julius Kitbok Dorphang Appellant
V/S
STATE OF MEGHALAYA Respondents

JUDGEMENT

(1.) Amid the legal nuances involved in this criminal appeal arising out of an order of conviction, there is also the story here of a young girl losing her way and her life being destroyed.

(2.) Upon a meaningful reading of the several statements that the survivor made, it is clear that at the age of about 14 years or so when the survivor was distressed with the parlous state of her somewhat uncaring family and when she had already been pulled out from school, she was lured by an elderly lady acquaintance to leave home. She then imagined the city lights and bustling life in Shillong that she was promised to be a distant dream and a welcome contrast to the daily drudgery that she faced in her small village in Ichamati bordering Bangladesh. The survivor recounted that she was brought by an elderly Nepali lady to Shillong and deposited with a Muslim family that lived in Demthring. The survivor even began calling the lady of the family "mummy" and the lady's husband "papa". The couple had two sons. The survivor spent an uneventful initial two months with her foster family but it does not appear that she experienced a vastly better life during such time and, in one of her statements, it appears that she expressed a desire to return home. She was persuaded by her new found "mummy" to stay back.

(3.) She recounted that after staying for about two months with the family at Dem-thring, she had her first menstrual periods and, shortly thereafter, she was taken one evening by her foster parents and another acquaintance of theirs to a guesthouse at Motinagar in the city. She consistently narrated in course of her two initial statements recorded before the members of the State Child Welfare Committee, her third statement recorded under Sec. 164 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973 and, finally, both in her examination-in-chief and cross-examination at her deposition at the trial, that she was given some drink to have before her first forced sexual encounter and she was intoxicated and not in her senses. She recounted the helpless feeling of her clothes being removed from her body and the pain and hurt that she experienced when she was violated but she remembered the face of the man. She went on to say that she was taken to the same man, the appellant herein, sometime later at a hotel in Nongpoh. It transpires that the hotel she referred to was the Umiam Lake Resort run by the tourism department of the State.