The Delhi High Court needed to make it clear that a woman crying doesn’t mean she was forced to pay dowry. After agreeing with a lower court’s decision to discharge claims of cruelty and dowry harassment against a husband and his family, Justice Neena Bansal Krishna remarked this.
The case was about a woman who married in December 2010 and died on March 31, 2014. She had two girls. The prosecution further maintains that the woman’s family told them they spent ₹4 lakh on the wedding and then asked for a motorcycle, money, and a gold bracelet.
The High Court threw out the case against the discharge because the sister of the dead individual said she had heard her sister crying on the phone. The court said, “But the fact that the deceased was crying does not, by itself, make a case of dowry harassment.”
The trial court let the accused free because the post-mortem investigation proved that pneumonia was the cause of death, which is normal. The High Court agreed and said that Section 498A IPC, which is about cruelty that leads to a woman’s death, did not apply in this case.
The court also ruled that the dead person’s father didn’t present any good proof or examples of the money demands that were supposed to have been made. The judge then observed, “In this case, these kinds of bare claims don’t even make a prima facie case of harassment.” This made it evident that you required a lot of proof to say that someone was mean. The verdict illustrates that the courts are putting more and more weight on compelling evidence and unambiguous charges to discourage people from taking advantage of laws against dowries.