Bombay High Court Reduces Sentence of Man Who Assaulted a 10-Month-Old

The Bombay High Court upheld the conviction of a man who sexually assaulted a 10-month-old girl — and then reduced his punishment, accepting his contention that he had lost control because he was living away from his family.

Ramkishan Harijan, a labourer working with a brick-trader in Mumbai, had been sentenced to ten years under Section 377 of the IPC. In his judgment, Justice M L Tahaliyani reduced the term to seven years and directed that the six years Harijan had already spent in jail be taken into account.

The reasoning drew sharp public criticism. That a man convicted of assaulting an infant could have his sentence shortened on the grounds of loneliness and distance from family struck many as a grotesque misapplication of judicial discretion — mitigation that said more about the court's sympathies than about anything in the facts.

The case landed in the middle of a national conversation about child sexual abuse — the POCSO Act had just passed Parliament that month, and Satyamev Jayate's widely watched episode on the subject had aired weeks earlier. Against that backdrop, a judgment that treated a convicted child abuser's circumstances as the more deserving of consideration than his victim's became an emblem of exactly what the reformers were fighting.

This article summarizes contemporaneous reporting from May 2012. The individual named was convicted by a court of law.