YADALI Vs. EMPEROR

JUDGEMENT

(1.) The petitioner has been convicted under Section 500 I.P.C., and sentenced to pay a fine of Rs. 40 in default to undergo rigorous imprisonment for one month. There were two items forming the subject-matter of the charge One of them was certain imputations made orally as against the complainant and the other consisted of certain statements made in a petition which the petitioner had filed before the Sub-Divisional Magistrate of Barrackpore. As regards the first of these items the evidence that was brought to establish it was not accepted as reliable by the trial Magistrate. The conviction is based upon the statements contained in the petition to which I have referred. Those statements are to the effect that the complainant was threatening the petitioner with assault and also with murder, imprisonment and so forth ; and that the complainant was giving out that he would institute civil as well as criminal cases against the accused and further that the complainant belonged to a gang of bad-mashes and goondas and the members of that gang were all conspiring together for the purpose of putting the petitioner into trouble and that for all these reasons the petitioner was apprehensive of his safety.

(2.) The learned Magistrate has recorded certain findings in his judgment in which he has dealt with the whole case very clearly and elaborately and to these I shall now refer. One line of defence taken by the petitioner was that he had himself heard the complainant and others hatching a plot against him. The learned Magistrate has held that the direct evidence that the accused gave for the purpose of establishing that he overheard a plot being hatched against him by the complainant was not reliable. The substance of the other line of defence was that there was enmity between the parties and the petitioner had reasonable ground for believing that there was such a plot. The learned Magistrate had observed, so far as this line of defence is concerned that there was no doubt that the petitioner had some reason for filing the petition, because it is probable that the petitioner feared something in the way of a litigation.

(3.) At the same time the learned Magistrate was of opinion that the petitioner " had no justifiable grounds for wording the petition in the way that he did or at least that the contents of the petition were gross exaggerations."