The Aurangabad bench of the Bombay High Court has overturned a 20-year-old conviction against a man and his family for alleged cruelty towards his late wife. The court found that the charges of teasing her, not allowing her to watch TV, preventing her from going to the temple alone and making her sleep on the carpet did not amount to serious action under section 498A of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). The high court said the allegations, which mainly focused on domestic issues, did not rise to the level of physical or mental cruelty.
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In its verdict, the court acquitted the man, his parents and his brother, who had been convicted by the trial court under sections 498A and 306 of the IPC for cruelty and abetment of suicide. The decision came after his appeal against the trial court’s sentence, Live Law reports. In the October 17 order, Justice Abhay S Waghawase, presiding over a single-judge bench, detailed the main allegations against the appellants. These included taunting the deceased over the food she cooked, banning her from using television, preventing her from visiting neighbors or going to the temple alone, making her sleep on the carpet, and asking her to throw out the garbage herself. .
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Family members of the deceased also alleged that they were forced to fetch water at midnight. However, the court pointed out that the testimony of witnesses revealed that in Warangaon, the village where the deceased and her in-laws lived, water supply was usually cut off around midnight, and to all houses around 1:30 am. There was a practice of collecting water.
