The supreme court has allowed a minor sentence for a woman, 67, who locked her two-year-old daughter into a tiny bathroom and denied her food and water for 14 days, resulting in the child’s death in 1996. This incident occurred in Nagpur district.
The mother, Sau Panchshila Dada Meshram, was 54 then, and her husband Dada believed a black magician, Daulat, who said that their daughter Rani was an inauspicious child. Daulat, a teacher, had left his job and donned the persona of a sorcerer, with many followers.
A Nagpur trialcourt judge held that Panchshila, her husband and Daulat “had wrongfully confined Rani in [a] 3.4X4 bathroom for about 14 days’’ and committed an offence of illegal confinement, murder and having the common intention to commit the crime, and handed out a life-imprisonment sentence to the tantrik and the child’s father.
The Bombay high court overturned the trial court’s judgment concerning Daulat, saying “there is no reliable evidence to prove that he was performing black magic or sorcery and Rani was confined into the bathroom at his instigation”, and acquitted him.
The high court also reduced the life term given to Rani’s parents to six years, holding that “there was no deliberate intention on the part of the motherand her husband to kill their daughter, Rani. But they definitely had knowledge that their action would result in injury which was likely to cause death of their child’’.
Therefore it altered the conviction, ordering six years imprisonment for them. The father completed the sentence, but the mother Sau was out on bail and moved the Supreme Court for acquittal. The apex court considered her plea favourably and set off the remaining sentence.
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