The Lucknow bench of the Allahabad high court recently acquitted a Faizabad man and his two relatives of dowry death charges, 35 years after his wife was found dead in a well, stating that the prosecution’s case was riddled with contradictions and never proved that she was harassed for dowry before she died.
Other co-accused died while their appeals were pending. Her body was recovered from a well near the home the next day. Police registered a case but no charge of murder was ever filed. The court found this was not established. It was not mentioned in the FIR or in statements to police during the investigation, and was raised for the first time when Urmila’s parents testified in court years later, the court noted.
Urmila, then 21, got married to Shiv Narain in May 1987. On the night of September 19-20, 1991, she went missing from her matrimonial home in Faizabad’s Khurdabad locality. Her father Medhi Lal Maurya filed a police complaint only on October 2, 1991, alleging that his daughter had been harassed for dowry and murdered by her husband and in-laws who then dumped her body to destroy evidence. A trial court convicted the accused in 1996 and sentenced them to up to seven years in prison. The court held that the 12-day delay in filing a formal complaint was not adequately explained, rejecting the prosecution’s claim that police had pressured the family to stay silent. The alleged dowry demand for a scooter was said to have been made once in November 1987.
Section 304-B of the IPC treats a death as a “dowry death” only if a woman is shown to have faced dowry harassment “soon before” her death, a condition that also triggers a legal presumption of guilt against the accused under Section 113-B of the Indian Evidence Act.
