Supreme Court grants bail to man accused of rape, abetment of suicide of girlfriend

The Supreme Court on Monday granted bail to a 21-year-old charged with rape and abetment of suicide of his girlfriend (Akash Thakur v. State of Madhya Pradesh)..A Bench of Justices Ajay Rastogi and Abhay S Oka granted bail to the petitioner, who was charged with offences under Section 306 (abetment of suicide) and Section 376 (rape) of the Indian Penal Code..The complaint was made by the family of the deceased, who was said to be in a consensual relationship with the the petitioner. As per the petitioner's case, he and the deceased studied together at the Maharaja Chhatrasal Bundelkhand University in Madhya Pradesh and were in a consensual relationship for over a year. .The family of the deceased noticed that she was missing on the intervening night of November 23-24, 2020. A missing persons complaint was filed by her father, pursuant to which her body was recovered from a well by the police. The post-mortem did not show any injury on the private parts and the cause of death was determined to be drowning..The family members went back on their Section 161 Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC) statements and lodged a complaint against the petitioner four months after the deceased's death, accusing him of abetment of suicide and rape. It was alleged in the fourth round of Section 161 statements given by the family that the deceased committed suicide because the petitioner refused to marry her..The Sessions Court and High Court denied regular bail to the petitioner on the basis of the statements given by the family members. Before the Supreme Court, the petitioner claimed that important facts like the previous rounds of statements where the family had mentioned no such thing, were ignored. It was further argued that the High Court failed to appreciate that the petitioner and the deceased were in a long-term, serious consensual relationship. Hence, any physical relationship was likely to be consensual. Further, it was argued that the petitioner surrendered himself to the police voluntarily and was in custody since July 29 this year..After hearing the arguments, the Bench held,"After we have heard learned Counsel for the parties, we are satisfied that the petitioner deserves indulgence of post-arrest bail.".Advocate-on-Record Hiren Dasan and Advocates Uday Gupta, Shivani Lal, Madan Singh Thakur, Sourabh Singh, MK Tripathi, Harish Dasan and Rajiv Ranjan appeared for the petitioner.Additional Advocate General Swarupama Chaturvedi, Advocate-on-Record Sunny Choudhary and Advocate Aakash Nandolia represented the State..[Read order]