Pune: Court acquits man accused of rape by former wife after promise to remarry her

Indian Express

3 days ago

A Pune court has acquitted a man in a case in which his former wife had accused him of raping her on the promise of marrying her again after their divorce.
The order acquitting the man was passed by Additional Sessions Judge S R Salunkhe, last week.
The court rejected the allegations made by the woman while stating that the physical relationship between the two was consensual.
'The prosecution has not made out the offence under Section 376(2)(n) of IPC, nor there is sufficient evidence to prove such offence. Even assuming any such physical relations between the informant and the accused, they do not constitute such offence, as they were with consent and were not under pretext of marriage. The legal consequence of this is that the accused is required to be held not guilty and therefore, he is entitled to be acquitted,' the judge said in the order.
After the verdict, the woman said she will appeal in higher court.
'I am disheartened but I respect the judgment. I will fight the case in the higher court till I get justice,' she told The Indian Express.
According to the prosecution, the complainant woman and the man got married in 2002 and had two daughters. However, the accused left the woman in 2010 and got married again in 2012. A court granted them divorce in 2015.
After the divorce, the woman married another man but their marriage survived for just five months. The prosecution had said that the accused again came in contact with the woman in 2019.
After assuring the woman of marrying her again, he had physical relationship with her, the prosecution argued.
When the woman asked the accused about the marriage, he allegedly refused to marry her after which she filed a police complaint in 2020.
Police made a preliminary inquiry and subsequently arrested the man under Section 376(2)(n) of IPC.
The prosecution argued that the accused repeatedly committed rape on the informant by giving false promise of remarriage without her consent.
Advocate Milind Pawar, who represented the accused, argued that the complaint was fake and it was the result of another complaint filed by the accused against the woman for extortion.
'The solitary statement of the informant is not sufficient in the absence of necessary corroboration to prove such a serious offence against the accused. There is an inordinate delay in lodging the complaint which is not explained,' he argued.
'She was conscious of her legal rights as she had already filed two legal proceedings against the accused… Only when the accused filed a complaint against her for extortion, she filed this complaint,' the advocate said.
Manoj More has been working with the Indian Express since 1992. For the first 16 years, he worked on the desk, edited stories, made pages, wrote special stories and handled The Indian Express edition. In 31 years of his career, he has regularly written stories on a range of topics, primarily on civic issues like state of roads, choked drains, garbage problems, inadequate transport facilities and the like. He has also written aggressively on local gondaism. He has primarily written civic stories from Pimpri-Chinchwad, Khadki, Maval and some parts of Pune. He has also covered stories from Kolhapur, Satara, Solapur, Sangli, Ahmednagar and Latur. He has had maximum impact stories from Pimpri-Chinchwad industrial city which he has covered extensively for the last three decades.
Manoj More has written over 20,000 stories. 10,000 of which are byline stories. Most of the stories pertain to civic issues and political ones. The biggest achievement of his career is getting a nearly two kilometre road done on Pune-Mumbai highway in Khadki in 2006. He wrote stories on the state of roads since 1997. In 10 years, nearly 200 two-wheeler riders had died in accidents due to the pathetic state of the road. The local cantonment board could not get the road redone as it lacked funds. The then PMC commissioner Pravin Pardeshi took the initiative, went out of his way and made the Khadki road by spending Rs 23 crore from JNNURM Funds. In the next 10 years after the road was made by the PMC, less than 10 citizens had died, effectively saving more than 100 lives.
Manoj More's campaign against tree cutting on Pune-Mumbai highway in 1999 and Pune-Nashik highway in 2004 saved 2000 trees.
During Covid, over 50 doctors were asked to pay Rs 30 lakh each for getting a job with PCMC. The PCMC administration alerted Manoj More who did a story on the subject, asking then corporators how much money they demanded....The story worked as doctors got the job without paying a single paisa.
Manoj More has also covered the "Latur drought" situation in 2015 when a "Latur water train" created quite a buzz in Maharashtra. He also covered the Malin tragedy where over 150 villagers had died.
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