Punjab and Haryana High Court (Express Photo by Kamleshwar Singh)
Stating that the person who died by suicide was a coward and “perished like an unsuccessful man in life foolishly,” the Punjab and Haryana High Court has held that merely a person’s name in the suicide note is not enough to conclude that the individual is guilty of abetment of suicide while quashing a 2011 FIR against four lawyers and two employees of a private company.
“Merely because a person, who has committed suicide, has left a suicide note, one cannot immediately jump to a conclusion that it is enough to mulct the accused with criminal liability under Section 306 IPC,” Justice P B Bajanthari has said in the judgment. “One has to analyse and examine the contents of the suicide note to find out whether it contains any incriminating information in the nature of instigation, provocation, forcing the victim to commit suicide.”
Justice Bajanthari, in the judgment, has further said that both the contents of the suicide note and circumstances surrounding the case have to be examined to probe the abetment accusation and observed that another person cannot be blamed for suicide “for the wrong decision taken by a coward, fool, idiot, a man of weak mentality, a man of frail mentality”.
“The overall analysis is required to be examined with the following incidents like if a lover commits suicide due to love failure, if a student commits suicide because of his poor performance in the examination, a client commits suicide because his case is dismissed, the lady, examiner, lawyer respectively cannot be held to have abetted the commission of suicide,” the judgment reads.
In the case adjudicated by the single bench, the victim, who was a manager (taxation) at Gurgaon-based company, had committed suicide on March 23 in 2011 and claimed in his suicide note that the four lawyers and two officers of his own company had forced him to commit suicide. While Gurgaon Police had registered a case in the matter, the accused had moved High Court against the FIR.
The victim, in his last note, had written that the accused had compelled him to commit certain illegalities in drafting of a company-related lawsuit which was filed at the Allahabad High Court. “Suicide note states that petitioners are responsible, which is very vague, and that too in his absence, it is impracticable for investigating officer to extract what was the real compulsion made by the petitioners while preparing and presenting the petition before the Allahabad High Court against the interest of the company,” the judgment reads.
The High Court single bench further said that no “cogent material” has been collected against the accused during the probe. “The offence of abetment requires ‘mens rea’ (guilty mind). There must be intentional doing/aiding or goading the commission of suicide by another. Otherwise, even a mere casual remark, something said in routine and usual conversation will be wrongly construed or misunderstood as ‘abetment’,” the judgment reads.