New Delhi: Taking note of the contradictions and material omissions in the complainant’s testimony, Kerala High Court Monday acquitted former state forest minister Dr A. Neelalohithadasan Nadar in a 2001 sexual harassment case.
Setting aside his conviction by a trial court and the court of sessions at Kozhikode, a bench of Justice Kauser Edappagath ruled that the “petitioner is found not guilty of the offence alleged against him, and he is acquitted”.
Significantly, The conviction by the lower courts based wholly on the complainant’s oral testimony in this case was set aside by the Kerala HC, on grounds that the complainant, a woman forest officer, was not a “sterling witness” and instead, had consistently refined and improved her statement, during the course of the proceedings.
“Her version of the incident testified in court has no correlation with her own police statement. The said version also does not match the accounts of other prosecution witnesses,” the court noted in its 15 September order.
The key question before the court in this case was whether the complainant’s testimony about the incident could be relied upon to implicate the minister.
However, the court found that her testimony was ridden with contradictions about the alleged incident, and said, that although the sole testimony of the victim in sexual offence cases, would be sufficient to form the basis of conviction “without any corroboration”, it is essential that the witness is found to be wholly reliable and her evidence is of “sterling quality”.
Saying that this was a fit case for giving the benefit of doubt to Nadar, the court added that the FIR against him was registered only in May 2001, after a delay of more than two years.
It also noted that the complainant had not given any good reason or explanation for this delay except that she was scared to make a complaint against the minister. since they were both employees of the state’s forest department.
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Incident that sparked allegations
The case arose from an alleged incident which occurred on 27 February, 1999, where a young woman officer of the Indian Forest Service (IFoS) who was then serving as the divisional forest officer, Kozhikode, filed a complaint against Nadar. She accused him of outraging her modesty, and the minister was booked under Section 354 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).
By way of her testimony before the court, the complainant said the former minister had asked her to come over to the Kozhikode Government Guest House between 9 and 9:30 am. When she arrived there, she saw three men standing there, who left after her arrival.
According to the complainant, once they were alone, Nadar allegedly grabbed her right hand and pulled her towards him, causing her shoulder to brush against his body, which she felt outraged her modesty, she told the court.
After this, she said she immediately ran out of the guest house. Initially frightened and lacking the courage to complain, she then informed her mother and close friend about the incident by way of a phone call, the same day. The next day, she reported the incident to the police commissioner, and even told other officials including the chairperson of the Kerala Women’s Commission, Forest Conservator, and the Chief Conservator of Forest (Vigilance).
The trial court convicted Nadar under Section 354 and sentenced him to one-year imprisonment in 1999. The court of sessions at Kozhikode upheld the conviction but modified his sentence to three months.
Who is a ‘sterling witness’
Before the court, Nadar’s lawyer said that his conviction was based solely on the complainant’s testimony which could not be legally sustained since it did not satisfy the test laid down by the Supreme Court for qualifying the testimony as being of “sterling quality”.
Nadar also contended that the trial court had erred in relying on the testimonies of the complainant’s mother and her friend, with whom she had shared the details of the incident. Their evidence was merely hearsay, and inadmissible, Nadar’s lawyer argued. Saying that the two-year delay in filing the complaint was also unacceptable, Nadar argued that the whole case was fabricated by the forest mafia, owing to their hostility towards him.
In its 27-page ruling, the court went on to note that witnesses can be classified into three categories, which are “wholly reliable”, “wholly unreliable” and those that fare somewhere in the middle of these categories, and are also known as “neither wholly reliable nor wholly unreliable” witnesses.
If the witness is wholly reliable, the conviction or acquittal could be based on the testimony of a single such witness, the court said.
However, if the witness is wholly unreliable, neither conviction nor acquittal can be based on their testimony.
In the third situation, if the witness falls somewhere in the middle, the court said that their testimony must be corroborated with material details from other reliable evidence.
Although, the court admitted that in sexual offence cases, the victim’s evidence is usually enough to convict the accused, it also recalled the Supreme Court’s 2011 ruling in Krishan Kumar Malik vs State of Haryana, where it held that conviction cannot be sustained if the prosecutrix’s testimony is found unreliable and insufficient due to identified flaws.
Pointing out, how in this case too the complainant’s testimony couldn’t be relied upon due to her “consistently refined and improved” statements made to officers and then before the court, the bench noted that her version of events before the court did not correlate with her version of the incident given in her police statement.
“The said version also does not match the accounts of other prosecution witnesses. After a thorough examination of PW1’s evidence, tested against legal standards and considering the circumstances, I am of the view that PW1 cannot be regarded as a ‘sterling witness’,” the court ruled while setting aside the minister’s earlier conviction.
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)
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