Rachna Aggarwal v. Anurag Mittal

1. Whether reporters of local papers may be allowed to see the judgment?

2. To be referred to the reporter or not?

3. Whether judgment should be reported in Digest? ORAL

1. The present petition has been filed by the petitioner against order dated 9th March, 2010, passed by learned MM dismissing the complaint of the petitioner against respondent under Section 441, 506 and 509 of IPC. The petitioner is estranged and separated wife of the respondent and matrimonial disputes are pending between them.

2. She filed a complaint before learned MM that on 13th March, 2005, she was to travel to Sirsa for an official tour. She had reached Old Delhi Railway Station to board the train. However, when she was about to board the train, the accused reached there and obstructed her way and tried to restrain her from boarding the train and used uncivilized and 2011:DHC:361 vulgar language. She, therefore, filed a written complaint before Police Station Old Delhi Railway Station about the incident. After filing this complaint, she examined herself as sole witness. However, she did not produce either the office order showing that she was to go for official tour to Sirsa on 13th March, 2005 or the ticket booked for her travel from Delhi to Sirsa. She did not examine any witness as to what was the purpose of her official tour. In the absence of any of the documentary evidence to corroborate her version, the learned trial court dismissed the complaint.

3. The learned counsel for the petitioner submitted that oral testimony of the petitioner was sufficient to summon the respondent and the previous conduct of the respondent in harassing the petitioner should have been taken into account and the trial court should have given credence to the testimony of the petitioner. Therefore, dismissal of complaint was unjustified.

4. This Court had observed time and again that summoning of a person in a criminal court should not be considered as a trivial matter as this affects the liberty of the person and the Court must scrutinize the evidence carefully before summoning the person as an accused. Wherever documentary evidence in support of oral testimony is easily available, the Court must look for corroboration of oral testimony from the documentary evidence. Whenever a complaint says that the complainant received telephone call, the court must summon the telephone company and look into the call record to ascertain if there was actually a call made or not. Similarly, wherever there was documentary evidence available to corroborate the oral testimony, the court must insist for examination of such documentary evidence to satisfy itself about the truthfulness of the oral testimony.

5. In the present case, according to complainant, she was on an official tour. The office order asking her to move to Sirsa were required to be made available to the Court to believe her testimony. Since she was on official tour, her ticket would have been booked only by the office in advance. She was not travelling without ticket. The record of ticket having been booked in advance is easily available either with railway authority or would have been available with her office that made payment for the ticket to the railway authorities. None of these documents was produced before the trial court. The particulars of the train i.e the name of train or its number in which she was to travel and her ticket was booked, were also not disclosed to the court. In the absence of corroborating evidence which would have been easily available to the complainant, the learned MM rightly rejected her complaint. I find no reason to interfere with the order of trial court. This revision is hereby dismissed.

JANUARY 20, 2011 SHIV NARAYAN DHINGRA, J. acm