A view of the Supreme Court of India (SCI) building, in New Delhi. File. | Photo Credit: ANI
The Supreme Court has overturned bail granted by the Allahabad High Court to a police officer accused of raping a 13-year-old who had come to his station to register a complaint of gang rape in Lalitpur district of Uttar Pradesh in 2022.
A Bench of Justices A.S. Bopanna and Sanjay Kumar ordered the accused, Tilakdhari Saroj, who was the Station House Officer (SHO) when the child came for help, to surrender immediately. The court directed the State of Uttar Pradesh to apprehend him in case he did not cooperate and send him to judicial custody.
The court passed the order on May 3 based on an appeal filed by the minor’s mother, represented by senior advocate H.S. Phoolka.
In its order, the Supreme Court said, that even in ordinary crimes, let alone offences of a serious nature as in the present case, an accused policeman should be treated on par with any other suspect. There was no need to show any leniency.
The apex court said the current case dealt with the alleged criminal conduct of a police officer, that too an SHO, to whom a child had come for justice. The prosecution case was that he committed the same crime as her abusers, the Bench said.
“In the present case, the situation is far worse as respondent No.1 (Saroj) being the Station House Officer of the police station where the minor victim girl was brought for securing her justice, is alleged to have resorted to committing the same heinous crime of raping her. We do not find any reasons worth the name justifying the grant of bail to respondent No.1 at this stage,” Justices Bopanna and Kumar concluded.
The High Court had given various reasons for granting regular bail to Saroj in May last year, including that jails were populated by undertrials five to six times above capacity. The Supreme Court drily observed the High Court should have gone beyond a cursory appraisal of the case which involved the trauma of a child who allegedly experienced a guardian of the law turn into an offender.
