Mumbai: A writ petition has been filed in the Bombay high court seeking directions to the state government and police to frame guidelines to prevent abuse of law in the form of criminal FIRs that are filed by former lovers when their relationships sour and result in rape charges.
The petition was filed by a girl and a boy who were involved as complainant and accused respectively in a rape case that was recently quashed by the high court after the girl denied the allegations. The girl had stated in the petition that her statement, which was recorded by the police in Marathi, was incorrect and beyond her understanding. The petitioners cited their own case, where the police had wrongly recorded the statement of the girl alleging that her boyfriend had raped her.
While denying the rape charge, the girl said she was in love with the boy but the police had wrongly recorded her statement and slapped rape charges against him.
The petition has sought framing of guidelines to prevent abuse of the law in love-related rape cases. The petitioners prayed that the victims might be permitted to record their statements in English or Hindi as against the Marathi language in police stations across Maharashtra to prevent ambiguity in the facts of the case. The couple also pleaded that arrests in such cases should be deferred when the accused are ready to cooperate in the investigation.
The petition also sought to save the lives of innocent people from being ruined with a stigma of a rape case. Mahesh Vaswani, the petitioners’ lawyer, said, “Now, the Supreme Court has given legality to live-in relationships and women and children also get maintenance money, so why should criminality be attached to it?”
