The appeal by a man who was jailed for sexual assault on a minor boy was rejected by the Meghalaya High Court today.
Arjun Das had moved the division bench of the High Court challenging his conviction passed by a POCSO Court on September 29, 2022 and the sentence pronounced against him on September 30, 2022.
The POCSO Court had convicted Das under Section 6 of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012 read with Section 506 of the India Penal Code, 1860.
“There is absolutely no merit in the appeal. There is no legal or factual basis to question the fundamental premise of the impugned judgment or the consequent order,” the High Court said in a verdict passed today.
“When the survivor is a child, it is difficult to imagine that a story would be conjured up out of nothing and the same would be consistently repeated. Thus, when the survivor is a child of, say, up to 11-12 years of age, unless the court finds the child to be precocious enough to make out a story and consistently repeat the same, the fact that there may not have been any witness to the incident of sexual assault may not, by itself, let the accused off the hook,” the High Court added.
Das was arrested following the First Information Report (FIR) lodged by the father of the minor boy on April 10, 2017 at the Pasteur Beat House in Shillong.
The father asserted that his son, then aged 9 and a student in a school in Polo Hills, Shillong, had been sexually molested by Das, to whom the boy used to go for tuition.
According to the FIR, on April 10, 2017, when the boy’s mother asked the boy to go for tuition and he was not interested to go, the mother enquired of the boy and discovered that Das would keep the boy back at the end of every tuition session and sexually abuse him. The FIR also referred to the boy complaining of pain in his rectum.
The nine-year-old boy rendered a statement on oath under Section 164 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973. He recollected that he went for tuition every day to the house of the tutor.
He recounted that there were two students in the tuition, the other being a boy by the name of Babuji. He asserted that Das would tie his hands with a handkerchief, cover the survivor’s mouth with his hand and sexually assault him.
The boy narrated that he had complained to his mother but the mother did not give him any attention or take note of his grievance. He claimed that every time he went for tuition, the act was repeated. He recalled that he had been threatened by Das to not reveal the matter to any person, or else the boy would be beaten up.
The boy even recounted that he had actually been beaten up by the tutor and this scared him from revealing the matter to others. He stated that since it was getting very painful for him and he felt a burning sensation, he had to tell his mother.
The boy was medically examined at Ganesh Das Hospital, Shillong on the same evening that the FIR was lodged. Before conducting the medical examination, the description of the incident in the words of the survivor was recorded.
