Sreya Kanugula
A Maharashtra court passed an acquittal on the charges of a 2014 case in which a school teacher was charged with abetting his teenage student’s suicide.
On January 15, 2021, the court issued the order, and the order’s copy became available on January 18th, in which Judge SS Gulhane, who presided over the additional sessions court stated that asking a student some questions doesn’t amount to suicide abetment.
The judge continued to state that the prosecutor had failed to prove the charge made under the IPC Section 305 (concerned with the abetment of suicide of a juvenile) against the accused person in this case.
The accused teacher taught mathematics at an ashram school found in Palghar’s Talasari taluka.
Information given on the victim by the prosecution was consistent with him studying the 10th grade at the same school, and his hanging allegedly took place from his Talasari house’s ceiling.
The boy’s classmates later informed his father about how when the inquiry was made about the marks received by the students in the math exam by the teacher accused, the deceased had lied about receiving more marks than he really had.
The teacher had asked the boy whether his father had made him lie and whether he should call the man to school, but the victim had refused to do so. Then the victim along with more students who had lied was sent to the headmaster by the teacher.
The prosecution’s argument rested on how humiliated the victim was made to feel by the accused’s line of questioning and had led to his suicide.
The judge gave the order that the accused’s questioning to the deceased about his father and asking whether he should call him to school didn’t amount to suicide abetment.
“There is no mens rea on part of the accused to abet the deceased to commit suicide,” the judge stated. And he further continued to say that the accused was a teacher and scolding students who lied was part of his job.
The accused’s statement did not instigate and was not an intentional aid to abetment of suicide, which was what the court’s order read.
It was necessary for the establishment of the accused’s acts to reasonably foresee that his conduct would most certainly or at the least, quite likely make the child commit suicide by the prosecution, said the judge in his order.
The court further said that “Unless this is established, a person cannot be charged with having abetted the commission of suicide, even if the suicide has been committed as a result of some of the acts committed by the accused.“