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The State of Bihar (now Jharkhand) v. Nilu Ganjhu @ Nilkant Ram Ganjhu

Criminal Appeal · 2025 INSC 942Decided 6 Aug 2025
Crl.A. No.-003382-003382 - 2025 (heard with Crl.A. No. 3381 of 2025)
Justice Pankaj Mithal · Justice Prasanna B. Varale

Background

In the intervening night of 1-2 April 1992 in Khunti (then Bihar, now Jharkhand), an explosion and fire engulfed the hut-like home of bus agent Santosh Kumar Singh, killing his two infant daughters while he and his wife narrowly escaped. The prosecution alleged the attack was carried out by Nilu Ganjhu, Mahboob Ansari, Anil Ganjhu and a fourth man, motivated by threats they had earlier made against the informant for continuing to work as a bus agent at Khunti as an "outsider." A trial court convicted several accused of murder and arson, but the Jharkhand High Court acquitted all of them, doubting the "bomb explosion" theory, the absence of independent witnesses, and the plausibility of parents fleeing a burning room while leaving their children behind. The State appealed the acquittal to the Supreme Court, while separately one accused, Dhanushdhari Ganjhu, relied on a hospital-admission alibi.

Decision Breakdown

The Supreme Court split the two connected appeals. For accused Dhanushdhari Ganjhu, it upheld the acquittal, finding his alibi defence: corroborated by hospital admission/discharge records and the treating doctor's unshaken testimony that he was hospitalized 38 km away for surgery during the relevant period: fully established and unrebutted by the prosecution. However, for accused Nilu Ganjhu and Mahboob Ansari, the Court held the High Court had seriously erred: it wrongly treated the case as resting purely on circumstantial evidence when the informant himself was an eyewitness who identified the accused fleeing the scene in electric light, and the High Court improperly speculated about "normal" parental behaviour in a life-threatening fire rather than accepting that witnesses react differently under trauma (citing Lahu Kamlakar Patil v. State of Maharashtra). The Court restored the trial court's conviction of Nilu Ganjhu and Mahboob Ansari, directing them to surrender within two weeks.

Lesson Learnt

An appellate court reversing a conviction must not substitute its own assumptions about how victims "should" behave during a traumatic crime for the trial court's assessment of consistent eyewitness testimony; conversely, a genuine and well-documented alibi (like hospital admission records corroborated by unshaken medical testimony) can be sufficient to sustain an acquittal even when co-accused are convicted on the same facts.

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

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