On February 9, a senior judge of the Bombay High Court, Justice Sadhana Jadhav, passed an order expunging the comments she herself had made last month while granting bail to a man accused of sexually abusing his minor adopted daughter. The order read:
“The last four lines of paragraph [4] of the order passed on January 16, 2017, which stand expunged with the above clarification are as follows:
She has admitted that she used to do all dirty things. It appears that she was inherently abnormal and had sexual instinct from her childhood, in all probabilities because of the environment and atmosphere in which she lived and because of the conduct of her mother.”
The matter was taken up for hearing on an urgent application made by the police to expunge the comments passed by the judge. Beneath this short order lies the history of humiliation a rape victim is constantly subjected to during court proceedings, despite the vibrant anti-rape movement in the country in the last three-and-a-half decades.
The accused was represented by a reputed criminal lawyer and it is quite obvious that documents – including a letter written by the child to the supervisor of her shelter home at the time of her adoption – that formed the chargesheet were brought to the notice of the judge by him. It is also likely that the additional public prosecutor did not strongly object that the document had no bearing on the case and was incriminatory. What is shocking is that the judge made her comments in an open court, which were then reported in newspapers.