Ashok Rai, who raped a 21-year old student that prompted her to commit suicide in 2003, can now stake claim for IAS or IPS, provided UPSC rules don’t have any reservations on accepting candidates with a tainted past.
The Supreme Court has dismissed an appeal from the National Commission for Women (NCW) challenging a high court verdict that reduced life term of a rape convict to five-and-a-half years to pave the way for him to join the civil services.
Thus, Ashok Rai, who raped a 21-year old student that prompted her to commit suicide in 2003, can now stake claim for IAS or IPS, provided Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) rules don’t have any reservations on accepting candidates with a tainted past.
The top court also handed a setback to NCW, which had filed the challenging the Delhi high court verdict on Rai. SC said it (NCW) had no legal right to file an appeal in a criminal case.
Delhi government has already told the court that it does not agree with the high court. In February last year, HC had slashed Rai’s sentence to five-and-a-half years, saying he had had “redeemed himself in jail” by qualifying for the UPSC examination.
Dismissing NCW’s appeal, a bench of justices HS Bedi and CK Prasad told counsel Priya Hingorani, “There is no provision in the criminal procedure code allowing persons other than the state, prosecutor or the kin of the victim to file an appeal under such circumstances. You have no locus standi (right) in the case.”
Hingorani said rape is a serious crime and HC has given untenable grounds for reducing the convict’s punishment.
Stressing that sentence in rape cases must be exemplary, SC had said the social impact of the crime, such as where it relates to offences against women, dacoity, kidnapping, misappropriation of public money, treason and other offences involving moral turpitude or moral delinquency, which have great impact on social order and public interest, cannot be lost sight of and per se require exemplary treatment.
Some other judgments in rape cases have interested the legal analysts.
In one, it said rape is “violation of the private person of a woman” and an “outrage by all means”.
“By the very nature of the offence, it is an obnoxious act of the highest order,’’ judges had said.
In another case, judged quashed a HC judgment that acquitted a rape convict on the ground he was drunk.
The court also held that a rapist couldn’t be acquitted merely because the victim is used to sex. Even if it is hypothetically accepted that the victim had lost her virginity earlier, it did not and cannot in law give license to any person to rape her.
“It is the accused who is on trial and not the victim,” the court said.
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