Trust Betrayed: Pune Court Sentences Man to 20 Years RI for Raping Two Minor Nieces
Trust Betrayed: Pune Court Sentences Man to 20 Years RI for Raping Two Minor Nieces
Justice has finally caught up with a 56-year-old man in Pune who shattered the safety of his own family. On April 11, a special POCSO court delivered a stern 20-year sentence of rigorous imprisonment to the convict, who was found guilty of the repeated sexual assault of his two young nieces.
Presiding Judge DP Ragit delivered a scathing assessment of the man’s actions, noting that the perpetrator exploited his status as a close family member to carry out “atrocious acts” against the girls, who were only 12 and 13 years old when the abuse began.
A Cycle of Deception and Fear
The convict, related to the victims through their mother’s stepsister, was a figure the girls had known and trusted as their ‘uncle’ their entire lives. However, the court found that throughout most of 2020—from January to November—he used this familiarity as a weapon. He frequently lured the sisters away from their residence in Uruli Devachi under the guise of taking them shopping for clothes and other gifts.
Instead, the prosecution proved that he took them to his own home and various local lodges to assault them. To ensure their silence, he created a “climate of absolute terror.” The judgment highlighted that, “The perpetrator used force to repeatedly violate the victims and issued death threats against their parents to ensure the girls never spoke a word of the abuse to anyone.”
The horrific cycle only broke in November 2020. The girls’ mother noticed they had become uncharacteristically withdrawn, “avoiding all conversation with her and appearing visibly distressed.” It wasn’t until a maternal aunt managed to gain their trust that the sisters finally felt safe enough to reveal the nightmare they had been living through.
During the trial, the defence attempted to argue that the crimes could not have happened at local lodges because of the strict COVID-19 lockdowns in place during 2020. The court, however, methodically rejected this claim. Investigators presented lodge registers proving the convict had checked in on dates like July 14 and September 10, 2020. Judge Ragit observed, “The fact that the accused secured rooms on those specific dates while accompanied by the girls proves that Pune was not under a total lockdown and that these establishments remained functional.”
The court also dismissed entries in the register for a 22-year-old woman named ‘Swapna’ as a complete fabrication used by the man to sneak the minors into the lodges. While the defence asked for mercy based on the man’s age and his responsibilities toward his wife and four children, the prosecution pushed for the maximum penalty given the “extreme severity of the crimes against the children.”
The court agreed, convicting him under IPC Sections 376(2)(f) and (n) for rape by a relative and habitual offense, alongside Sections 4 and 6 of the POCSO Act. The judge affirmed that the evidence was, “Entirely adequate to establish that the accused committed penetrative sexual assault and rape against the 12 and 13-year-old victims, while also using criminal intimidation by threatening the lives of their parents.”
In addition to the 20-year prison term and a ₹30,000 fine, the court took a vital step toward the girls’ recovery. Judge Ragit directed the District Legal Services Authority in Pune to determine a fair amount of financial restitution for the sisters under the official victim compensation framework.
