Bombay high court upholds conviction of man who killed daughter

Showing no leniency towards a man who killed his two and a half-year-old daughter, the Bombay high court recently confirmed the life-imprisonment sentence handed to him by a trial court.

Raju Mane, 28, had filed an appeal against his conviction and sentence in 2009. On June 9, 2007, the body of his two and a half-year-old daughter Aishwarya was found floating in a well in a village in Ahmednagar.

The case before the court, however, was not easy to prove, as there were no eye-witnesses to the incident. The Aurangabad bench of the high court, however, said that the circumstantial evidence taken into account by the trial court was sufficient to infer that Mane had murdered his daughter.

Mane’s wife Sangita told the police that they got married in 2002 and had two children, Gaurav and Aishwarya. However, their marriage ran into troubled waters after Aishwarya was born, as Mane was doubtful about Sangita’s loyalty to him. “According to the prosecution, he suspected that Aishwarya was fathered by someone else,” the court record states. Sangita said that he had earlier threatened to kill Aishwarya, and after a bitter quarrel in May 2007, Sangita had returned to her parents’ house. On June 8, Mane forcibly took Aishwarya away from her, Sangita said.

Aishwarya’s body was found the next day, wearing the same yellow dress that she had worn the day before.

The court rubbished Mane’s defence of Aishwarya’s accidental death, as it felt that it was unlikely that a two-year-old would travel two kilometres on her own and then fall into a well. “We do not find perversity or infirmity in the judgment and sentence inflicted upon
the appellant by the trial court. This appeal is devoid of substance,” the judges said, while confirming Mane’s punishment.