New Delhi: The Punjab and Haryana high court has observed that courts should exercise flexibility in considering petitions for quashing kidnapping cases involving runaway couples.
Justice Sumeet Goel said the fact that the victim being a minor at the time of the alleged crime should prevent courts from declining the quashing plea. He added that the high court is well within its jurisdiction to factor in the entirety of the facts, including the fact that the victim has attained major age and is still in the marriage.
The court expressed concern over the routine filing of petitions calling for the quashing of first information reports (FIRs) where the man in the runaway couple is accused of luring away the woman, by the family which is not in favour of marriage.
Quoting Shakespeare, the court said, “A marriage is a matter of more worth, than to be dealt in by attorneyship.” Reproducing a quote from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Justice Goel said, “Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind; And therefore is wing’d Cupid painted blind.”
The court then ruled, “Where the impugned FIR pertains to allegation of offences under Sections 363-A/366 of IPC & it emerges that the accused and the victim have married each other and are living happily, the High Court ought to consider, with a high degree of latitude, such plea for quashing such an FIR … Such plea would be fortified in case child has been born from the wedlock.”
The court was hearing a petition moved by a man who was booked in 2009 for allegedly luring away a girl for marriage. The accused was arrested seven years later and subsequently granted bail.
The man urged the high court to quash the FIR, underlining that he and the woman (the alleged victim) were in love and had been living as husband and wife since 2010. The court was informed that the couple has three children together.
“For parents to tether their affinity towards a daughter only through (injured) honour, psychogenic pain of separation or sheer dominance of Will is neither altruistic nor a kindred affinity, both of which are necessary foundation to a family,” the court said.
Justice Goel underlined that parents must come to terms with the fact that their children may make individual choices and that certain consequential life events cannot be reversed.
The court then went on to say that for a couple, who have been married happily for long and have children, it can be embarrassing, unsettling and even disconcerting to be subjected to “unabated withering” over their matrimony.
Justice Goel further said that the father’s rancour cannot be permitted to remain “extant ad infinitum ad nauseam” and it would be patently ludicrous to question and scrutinise the accused, who is the husband of the alleged victim. “A marriage is a matter of more worth, than to be dealt in by attorneyship,” he said, referring to a line from Shakespeare’s play Henry VI.
The court found it a fit case to exercise its inherent jurisdiction to quash the FIR.
