Woman loses dowry case against husband, in-laws

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/hyderabad/Woman-loses-dowry-case-against-husband-in-laws/articleshow/19641464.cms

HYDERABAD: It is an unusual case of a woman being found guilty in a dowry harassment case! Not having been convinced by her complaint that the relatives of her husband had beaten her in her parents' house, the AP High Court has quashed a dowry case against them.

Responding to a plea by the family of the husband including his parents, sister, brother, etc, Justice Reddy Kantha Rao said allowing this case to proceed up to trial stage would only result in substantial injustice to the husband's family.

"The alleged attack is unlikely to have happened because the place of occurrence is her parents' residence where all her friends and relatives would have been around and prevented an attack on her. This attack theory seems to have been invented only for the purpose of implicating the husband and his entire family in a dowry case," the judge said.

The judge made this order after hearing the petition filed by Tummala Ramnarayana, the father-in-law of the woman, of MVP Colony, Visakhapatnam, who urged the court to quash the dowry harassment case.

The woman, mother of a 3-year-old daughter and hailing from Rajahmundry, said that her husband and his family had harassed her for additional dowry. She claimed her parents gave her husband Rs 15 lakh as dowry at the time of her marriage. According to her, he had quit his job because of mounting debts in Visakhapatnam. Though her parents brought the couple to Rajamundry, he ran into debts there as well. When she objected to his bad ways, he beat her, demanded Rs 5 lakh more for clearing the debts and went away to Vizag, she said.

According to her, it was after this that the parents of her husband and his relatives came to Rajahmundry and beat her at her house when her mother and brother were not at home. Following her complaint, a local court referred the matter to police.

The judge in his order said that even the chargesheet filed by the police was nothing but a replica of her complaint. The judge in his order said that beating a woman in her native place in the middle of her friends and relatives by her husband's family looked improbable and unnatural and quashed the case initiated by the Rajahmundry court.