Last Updated on August 11, 2021 by Administrator
By- Arshita Anand.
In a criminal revision application filed against a judgment passed in 2018 where the applicant was convicted, the High Court of Bombay observed that “the very act of throwing a chit on a woman’s person which professes love for her and which contains poetic verses, albeit extremely, purely written is sufficient to outrage the modesty of a woman”
An FIR was lodged by the victim stating that the applicant had tried to hand over a chit to her. When she refused to accept the same, he threw it on her and left muttering “I love you”. It was further alleged that the next morning, the applicant made obscene gestures and warned her not to disclose the contents of the chit to anyone.
The applicant was held guilty under under Section 354, Section 509 and Section 506 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). However, Justice Rohit B Deo observed that section 506 was not applicable in this case.
“The sine qua non ingredients of Section 506 is criminal intimidation as defined in Section 503 of the IPC. A bare perusal of Section 503 would reveal that the threat must be with intent to cause injury either to person, reputation or property and the intent must be to cause alarm to that person, or to cause that person to do any act which he is not legally bound to do, or to omit to do any act which that person is legally entitled to do”
The Court also said that since the incident occurred ten years back, the applicant deserved a chance to reform and further incarceration was not likely to be of any avail. Thus, the applicant’s punishment of imprisonment of 2 years by the Judicial Magistrate First Class, Court 8, Akola was done away with as the applicant had already spent 45 days in incarceration.
