A sitting Session judge along with his family has moved Nagpur bench of Bombay High Court to quash the FIR registered against him by his estranged wife. His wife has alleged that her husband subjected her to unnatural sex and harassed her physically as well as mentally.
A division bench comprising of Zaka Haq and Shreeram Modak has granted the interim respite to the accused and his family. The court has also directed the police not to file a charge sheet without the court’s permission and clarified that the petitioner need not pay frequent visits to the police station until further orders.
The HC bench observed, “Considering facts of the case, especially wife’s complaint after filing mutual divorce case under Section 13-B of Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, we keep in abeyance sessions judge directives in anticipatory bail application filed by petitioners.”
The accused judge and his family had approached Bombay High Court through advocate Pervez Mirza, challenging session court verdict. Earlier the petitioner had sought anticipatory bail in the session court where they were directed to visit police station every Sunday. They later challenged the session court order in Bombay HC citing reasons that all the family members are government employees and it wasn’t possible to travel amid the lockdown period.
The petitioners termed it a matrimonial dispute and stated that all the allegations posed against them are completely false, vague, cryptic, omnibus, and contradictory in nature. They contended, “There is an unexplained delay of 13 months in FIR registration which makes entire charges highly doubtful and suspicious. The wife also suppressed the fact that a divorce case with mutual consent was filed at Malakpur court last year as they were residing separately since September 2018.”
The woman had filed a complaint against her husband in Muktai Nagar Police Station in Jalgaon which was later transferred to Warud police station in Amravati on the grounds of “want of jurisdiction”. She had alleged her husband of subjecting her to unnatural sex, clicking obscene photographs of her, and harassing her mentally as well as physically.
Following the complaint of the woman, police had booked the husband and her in-laws under Section 498A, 377, 323, 504, and 506 of the Indian Penal Code.
