They let the other passengers off the bus first, then shut the doors on the ones they had come for
Justices Rajasekhar Mantha and Anuj Singh affirmed life sentences for a 1985 political killing, holding that separate attribution of every injury to each member of an unlawful assembly is not required.
The occurrence was on the afternoon of 7 August 1985. The charge sheet came in 1987, charges were framed in 1991, the trial court convicted in 2010, and on 14 October 2026 the Calcutta High Court dismissed the appeals. Forty-one years separate the stones in the road from the last word on them, and several of the appellants did not live to hear it: the judgment speaks throughout of the surviving appellants.
How the village got to that morning
The prosecution case has its genesis in political rivalry between supporters of the Congress (I) and the CPI(M) in a village within Mathabhanga Police Station in Cooch Behar district.
Some time before the occurrence, the wife of a Congress supporter died by hanging at her matrimonial home. On the prosecution case her father did not initially lodge any complaint, but was subsequently compelled by CPI(M) supporters to lodge one alleging that her husband had murdered her. That flared up the existing tension. The prosecution further alleged a social boycott of the husband's family, imposed by preventing the barber and the priest from giving their services.
The bus
On 7 August 1985 the Congress party had convened a meeting at Gopalpur. Several members decided to assemble at one supporter's house and travel together. At about 10 a.m. the General Secretary of the Mathabhanga Block Congress arrived there, and the group walked from their village to Ichhaganj Mor to board a minibus named Poushali for Gopalpur.
At about 2.30 p.m. the bus reached a bend where the road had been blocked with stones. Some twenty to twenty-five men were waiting, armed with lathis, ballams, khapras, spades, beki, sword and ramdo. They stopped the bus and surrounded it. There were a considerable number of passengers inside. They permitted the other passengers to leave, detained the Congress group, and damaged the bus. Then they got in and began beating the Congress supporters after identifying them.
Two men died on the spot in the assault, and their bodies were left lying inside the bus. The assailants left once they realised the two were dead.
What the record was made of
About twenty to twenty-five minutes later one of the group got another bus to Mathabhanga Police Station and gave an oral statement to the officer in charge, who wrote it down and explained its contents to him. The complaint was recorded at 17.10 hours — about three hours after the occurrence — and the FIR was registered against twenty named accused under Sections 147, 148, 149, 427, 323, 324, 307 and 302 of the Indian Penal Code.
There was an earlier route to the police as well, which the judgment traces. The President of the Mathabhanga Block Congress had reached the police station at about 3 p.m., having been told that a minibus carrying Congress supporters had been held up. He first went to the Border Security Force camp, which took no action, and then informed the police from the post office. A Sub-Inspector went to the spot and held the inquests over the bodies inside the bus between 3 p.m. and 4.30 p.m.
The investigating officer prepared surathal reports over each body that afternoon and a rough sketch map of the place of occurrence the same day. The post-mortems on both bodies were conducted and reported the following day. The charge sheet, when it came on 20 October 1987, was against twenty-six accused.
At trial the prosecution examined twenty witnesses and exhibited seventeen documents and one material exhibit.
What the first witness described
The principal witness was the man at whose house the group had assembled and who later took the second bus to the police station. His evidence sets out the sequence the Court worked from.
He deposed to the political hostility between the two groups following the death of the woman, to the case filed against her husband, and to the alleged social boycott of that family. He deposed that the General Secretary and twelve or thirteen Congress supporters assembled at his house that day to go to the meeting at Gopalpur, and that they boarded the minibus at about 2.30 p.m.
Near the bend, he said, he found the road blocked by stones and twenty to twenty-five men standing there, armed with lathi, ballam, khapar, beki, sword and ramdo. They detained the bus and surrounded it. There were a considerable number of passengers inside. They permitted the other passengers to leave, detained his group, and damaged the bus. He named those who were inside it with him. The assault began when one of his companions attempted to get down.
The medical evidence tracked that account. One doctor proved the injuries of five of the prosecution witnesses, among them sharp cut injuries on two named men, with lacerations, bruises and abrasions on others; a second proved bone cut injuries on a sixth. The weapons the witnesses described — khapar, ballams and sharp weapons — matched the wounds.
Common object
The conviction rests on Section 149, and the Court's treatment of it is the part with reach beyond this case.
The appellants relied on a decision in which some accused had been acquitted on a finding that they did not share a common object with those who assaulted a particular person, the assault on whom was neither pre-planned nor shared as a common object, and where the evidence did not disclose that an unlawful assembly had come into existence on the spur of the moment.
The Bench held that decision rendered no help here, because this is not a case of that nature. In the present case the very object of the unlawful assembly was to commit the murder, and the deceased was in fact murdered in pursuance of that common object. The participation of the appellants not being in doubt, their conviction with the aid of Section 149 could not be assailed. The trial court was therefore right in holding that all the appellants shared the common object to commit murder and to cause hurt with a dangerous weapon.
The facts bear that out in an unusually direct way. An assembly which blocks a road with stones, waits armed, allows uninvolved passengers to disembark and then identifies its targets inside the bus is not an assembly that formed on the spur of the moment or acquired its object by accident.
The hurt convictions, and who caused which injury
On the convictions for voluntarily causing hurt with a dangerous weapon, a medical witness proved the injuries of five of the prosecution witnesses — sharp cut injuries on two of them, with lacerations, bruises and abrasions sustained by the injured — and another proved bone cut injuries to a sixth. The evidence relating to assault by khapar, ballams and sharp weapons was held duly corroborated.
The injuries were inflicted during the attack and the act of causing hurt was in furtherance of the common object of the assembly; the appellants' membership of that assembly was clearly established. On that footing the Court stated the proposition shortly: “separate attribution of every injury to each appellant is not a necessary requirement of the law”. The conviction under Sections 324 and 149 was upheld.
The Court also disposed of an argument from inconsistency: the fact that the same accused were acquitted under Sections 307 and 149 does not affect that conclusion. An acquittal on one count of an unlawful assembly charge does not unravel the findings on the others.
The order
The convictions of the appellants under Sections 302 and 324, each read with Section 149, were affirmed. Having considered the nature of the offences and the circumstances of the occurrence, the Court found no ground to interfere with the sentences imposed by the trial court — imprisonment for life with a fine on the murder count, and two years with a fine on the hurt count, to run concurrently.
Both appeals were dismissed insofar as the surviving appellants are concerned, and all the pending interlocutory applications in them disposed of. The period of detention already undergone during investigation, inquiry and trial is to be set off under Section 428 of the Code of Criminal Procedure. A copy of the judgment with the lower court records was directed to be transmitted to the trial court forthwith.
Mr Prabir Kumar Mitra, senior advocate, appeared for the appellants with three others; Mr Debojyoti Deb and Ms Nayana Mukhopadhyay for the State. The hearing concluded on 22 September 2026.
The appellants named in the two appeals were seven men by the time the High Court heard them. Several others against whom the trial court had recorded convictions in 2010 had died in the sixteen years the appeals were pending, which is why the operative order speaks only of those who survived to receive it.
The trial itself had taken from the framing of charges in August 1991 to judgment in July 2010, with sentence passed the following day. The two appeals were filed that year and heard to a conclusion in September 2026.
Both the men who died that afternoon were office-bearers or workers of the party whose meeting the group had set out to attend, and the two appeals that reached the High Court between them carried the convictions of every man the trial court had found to be part of the assembly at the roadblock.