The accused discreetly sneaked into her house late in the night, sat on her cot and touched her feet
The Bombay High Court on Friday upheld a one-year jail term for a 36-year-old man from Partur in Jalna district, who outraged his modesty by secretly touching the feet of a neighbor at his house late at night.
According to the prosecution, at around 11 pm on July 4, 2014, the woman felt that someone was touching her feet. When she got up, she found her neighbor Parmeshwar Dhaage sitting on his cot.
The shocked woman screamed for help, which woke up her mother-in-law too, who cried for help. Dhaaga ran away from the house before his other neighbors could gather at his cries.
The next day, he approached the police and enforced the criminal law. On 25 June 2015, the Judicial Magistrate of the First Class at Partur convicted him of criminal trespass and outraged the modesty of a woman and sentenced him to one year's rigorous imprisonment.
The thread moved the high court after the Jalna sessions court upheld his sentence and upheld the jail term.
It was argued on their behalf before the High Court that on that fateful night, the husband of the woman was not at home and the door of the house was not locked and these factors indicate that the convict entered her house with her consent. did. Either way, his lawyer submitted that the thread had no sexual intention to touch the woman's feet and hence his sentence could have been quashed.
The argument, however, failed to impress a single-judge bench of Justice MG Sevlikar, who noted that the convict was sitting on the woman's cot during the night and was touching her feet. "This behavior smacks of sexual intent," the judge said. "Otherwise, there was no reason for the applicant to stay at the victim's house at such an odd hour of the night."
Further, the court said, "Touching of any part of a woman's body by a stranger without her consent, would also amount to a breach of the modesty of a woman in the dark of night."
“The applicant did not enter the victim’s house with any lofty motive,” the court said, adding that in the evening he questioned the woman and confirmed that her husband would not be present in the house at night. “Therefore, the applicant undertook to enter the house. This clearly indicates that the applicant had gone there with sexual intent and violated the modesty of the informer,” the court observed.