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Manak Chand @ Mani vs. The State of Haryana

Criminal Appeal · 2023 INSC 959Decided 30 Oct 2023
Criminal Appeal No. 2276 of 2014

Background

The appellant was convicted of rape after the complainant (his brother's sister-in-law) alleged he raped her multiple times while she was staying at her sister's matrimonial home to help after childbirth. She did not disclose this to her family for over a month, and it emerged only after a proposed marriage between her and the appellant was arranged but then called off by the appellant's family, after which her father filed the FIR. The prosecution's key evidence on her age (which mattered because the age of consent at the time was 16, later raised to 18 in 2013) was a school register showing a date of birth that would have made her 13½ years old, while the doctor who examined her recorded her age, based on the mother's own statement, as 16.

Decision Breakdown

The Supreme Court found the prosecutrix's testimony did not "inspire confidence": the first alleged rape supposedly occurred the same day school attendance records showed her present in class in a different village, and no bone ossification test was conducted despite age being a crucial and contested fact. Citing precedent that a school register's date of birth has no evidentiary value unless the person who made the entry or supplied the information testifies, the Court held the prosecution failed to reliably prove the prosecutrix was under 16. Combined with the sequence of events (an initially agreed marriage proposal that was later rejected, only after which the FIR was filed) and the near-adult development noted in the medical report, the Court found the case pointed more toward a consensual relationship than rape, and that the ingredients of rape under Section 375 IPC were not established beyond reasonable doubt. The conviction was set aside and the appellant acquitted.

Lesson Learnt

In a case turning on a person's age, courts require reliable proof such as a bone ossification test or testimony from whoever recorded a school register's date of birth: a bare document entry, especially one not made on parental information, cannot alone establish age when the consequence is a serious criminal conviction.

Official source (sci.gov.in)View Judgment (PDF)

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