The Delhi High Court said in granting bail to a man accused of ‘raping’ his alleged minor partner who has ‘three different dates of birth,’ according to official documents, that a person in a consensual physical relationship is not required to judicially scrutinize his partner’s date of birth.
The court ruled that a person is not required to see his partner’s Aadhaar card or PAN card or verify her date of birth from her school records before entering into a consensual physical relationship with her, and it granted relief to the accused who claimed that the prosecutrix was giving her dates of birth for her own convenience only to invoke the provisions of the child abuse law against him.
‘A person who is in a consensual physical relationship with another person is not required to judicially investigate the other person’s date of birth’. Before entering into a physical relationship, he is not required to see her Aadhaar card, PAN card, or verify her date of birth from her school records.
‘The mere presence of an Aadhaar card, which shows the applicant’s date of birth as 01.01.1998, is sufficient for the applicant to form the opinion that he was not engaging in a physical relationship with a minor,’ Justice Jasmeet Singh wrote in an August 24 order. ‘In terms of birth dates, it appears that the prosecutrix was born on three different occasions. According to her Aadhaar card, she was born on January 1, 1998, making her a major on the date of the alleged incident’, the judge continued.
The court stated that, based on the transfers of ‘huge amounts of money’ in favour of the prosecutrix, it appears to be a case of honey-trapping and that no satisfactory reason was given for the ‘inordinate delay’ in the registration of an FIR in April for the alleged incidents that occurred in 2019 and 2021. The court directed the police commissioner to conduct a thorough investigation into the prosecutrix’s pending FIRs against others, as well as her Aadhaar card details.
‘I believe that there is much more to this situation than meets the eye. According to the prosecutrix’s own testimony and the FIR, she has been in a relationship with the applicant since 2019. If the applicant had blackmailed the prosecutrix, she could have approached the police at an earlier stage’, said the judge.
‘Primarily, I believe this is also a case of such an incident (of honey-trapping). If the prosecutrix files a similar FIR against another person in Delhi, the commissioner of police must conduct a thorough investigation. The police will also look into the Aadhaar card… as well as the date of issuance and the supporting documents filed for the issuance of the said Aadhaar card’, he also added.
The court ordered that the accused be released on a personal bond of 20,000 with one local surety, and that he report to the police station on a regular basis and appear in court whenever the case is heard. It also requested that the accused not leave the country and surrender his passport, as well as refrain from engaging in any criminal activity or communicating with anyone connected to the case.
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