SARAT CHANDRA CHAKRAVARTY Vs. EMPEROR

JUDGEMENT

(1.) These three appeals are preferred from convictions and sentences passed on the three appellants by a Court consisting of the Sessions Judge of Bakarganj and a jury. All three appellants were convicted of abduction under Section 366, I.P.C., and appellant 1, in addition to being convicted of abduction, was also convicted of rape. The sentence passed upon appellant 1, who is a Sub-Inspector of Police, was rigorous imprisonment for seven years, that being passed on the conviction under Section 376, and the learned Judge in his case passed no separate sentence under his 366 abduction conviction. The two other appellants were sentenced to five years rigorous imprisonment apiece under the abduction conviction. It may be noted that the convictions were brought in on majority verdicts, the majority being 3 to 2 in favour of all the convictions I have mentioned. Appellant 1 whose name is Sarat Chandra Chakravarty is a Brahmin Sub-Inspector of Police known locally as the Chhota Daroga and as such he is referred to almost universally in the evidence. The two other appellants are employed at the kutchery at a place called Rajpasha. They are known as the Mridha and the Haldar of the kutchery in question. The victim of this abduction and rape, as the jury found it, was a Sudra Hindu widow girl and perhaps it may be convenient if I quite briefly mention the facts relied on by the prosecution and accepted by the jury.

(2.) At the end of the mon January, last it became the duty of appellant 1 in his capacity as Sub-Inspector of Police to make a visit to Rajpasha for the purpose of investigating the complaint of a theft which had been made to his head quarters. One of the persons who, it was alleged, concerned in this theft was the father of the widow girl whose name is Madhumala, and it is said that the Sub-Inspector shortly after dusk visited the Bari where this girl, her mother and her old mother-in-law lived together, and after some conversation the girl was carried away from the hut, screaming, to the Sub-Inspector's boat which had arrived at the place which they ferried across the river and tied up there by the two kutohery people. Appellants 2 and 3 were then dismissed and it is said that throughout the night the Sub- Inspector occupied his time by alternately drinking liquor, trying to force liquor upon the girl and criminally assaulting her. Then it is said that when daybreak came, the girl was put ashore and conducted to a deserted house being dragged across the field to this house; afterwards she made her way back to her own hut where she told two older women in the household about what had occurred. The prosecution case was that there were a number of people who watched all this happening, as far as the getting to the boat two groups of people, the villagers who saw the girl being carried off, and there were other witnesses who saw her being landed again the next morning. It is common ground that there was considerable delay in making the complaint concerning the abduction and the rape. It is also common ground that the girl was permanently on bad terms with appellant 2 whose name I should have stated is Jadu Nath Sinha over a petty land dispute and, as I have already pointed out, the visit to the hut where the girl lived was made because of the complaint of theft which led to the Sub. Inspector's visit. That roughly is the prosecution case.

(3.) The defence case is not a denial that the Sub-Inspector ever went there because it is admitted that he did. But it is said that he never spent the night in the boat at all either by himself or with the girl at all but that he spent the night in the kutchery. It is also said that when the Sub-Inspector came to the girl's house to make inquiries (this is the defence case) that there was some kind of a souffle and that she took up a dao that was lying in the hut and menaced the Sub-Inspector with this dao. The two employees at the kutchery denied that they were involved in this abduction leading to the rape at all. Now, I may say at once that although such a view would not be sufficient or proper to enable an appellate Court to set aside a conviction and a sentence of a lower Court in which findings of fact have been brought in by a jury, I consider that this is a false case. I do not believe that Brahmin Sub-Inspector of Police would openly carry off a Sudra girl widow in the presence of the whole village for the purpose of criminally assaulting her. I am not prepared to say that persons in this profession (I am referring to members of the police) do not surreptitiously at times indulge in connexion with village girls. I believe if such people wish to do that, it is not very difficult but it is not a course that they would ever pursue openly for very good reasons into which I need not enter.