Bombay HC terms student's indiscretions mistake'

Mumbai: The Bombay high court on Friday stayed the framing-of-charges procedure against a college student accused of outraging the modesty of a 19-year-old girl. While doing so, the HC said, “At a young age, one makes many mistakes without thinking,” and asked the complainant’s lawyer to find out from her parents if they were ready to quash the FIR filed in the matter.

A division bench of Justice V.M. Kanade and Justice Nutan Sardesai was hearing a writ petition filed by the 20-year-old accused from Pune, in which he demanded that the criminal complaint that the girl had filed against him be quashed.

According to the petition, the boy and the complainant are students in the same college in Pune, and had been partying at the city’s Westin hotel on the night of March 13 this year, when he allegedly touched her inappropriately. The Mundwa police arrested him the next day under section 354 of the Indian Penal Code, which pertains to outraging the modesty of a woman, and produced him before a magistrate, who remanded him to police custody for one day.

The petition stated that the complainant and boy were in a ‘sharing, loving, caring, emotional, physical and intimate’ relationship for over two and a half years. It added that the FIR is nothing but an outcome of a love affair gone sour between the two students concerned.

The petition prayed that the complaint be quashed since the 20-year-old boy is a student who has a long way to go in his career, which now faces ruin. The youth has attached photographs of him with the complainant, apart from messages shared on WhatsApp, with the petition to show that they were in a relationship.

The petitioner’s lawyer told the HC that the police should check the hotel’s CCTV footage from the night of the alleged incident, which would clearly show that he hadn’t done anything inappropriate to her. The court has kept the next date of hearing as December 9.