Mumbai: Calling his act a “heinous offence”, a Dindoshi court on Thursday sentenced the 53-year-old father of a motherless teen to seventeen years of rigorous imprisonment. The man would beat the 14-year-old if she did not comply and then sexually assault her tying her hands and feet. This went on for two years.
The teen was living with her father, real brothers, stepmother and step-siblings in a western suburb. Her mother died when she was young and thereafter, her father married her stepmother.
Additional Sessions Judge AZ Khan said in the judgment, “The accused has committed such offences with his own daughter when he was the custodian and had to take care of the victim…” The man had sought leniency and told the court that he has a family dependent on him and also that he has suffered a paralytic attack. The court said that he committed rape of his own minor daughter and had also beaten and threatened her, which makes the offence more serious. It did not consider his reasons as mitigating circumstances and said he is not entitled to a lenient view.
The man had brought his wife (the victim’s stepmother) as a defence witness in his support. The stepmother told the court that the complainant, being a relative of her husband’s first wife, had falsely implicated him only because he remarried after his first wife's demise. The court did not believe her testimony and noted that the accused made no such allegation during the investigation or earlier during the trial. It found the testimony of the victim convincing.
The incident had come to light only when the victim, 13 years at the time, had gone to her maternal grandmother with a bleeding mouth and hands tied behind her back. She had not told her grandmother about the sexual assault at the time and only that her father physically assaulted her. Her grandmother had sent her back home after pacifying her. The teen then returned three days later and this time refused to go back home even if she must die. She then revealed that her father had sexually assaulted her for two years. They then approached the police.
