The Sessions Judge disbelieved her on one charge and believed her on the other, and explained the gap with a remark about daring women

A conviction cannot rest on half a witness. Seventeen years after the FIR, and after six years already served, the Supreme Court sets aside a rape conviction that two courts had built on evidence one of them had already rejected.

An accused charged with both kidnapping a woman and raping her presents a court with one witness and two questions, and the answers are not independent of each other. If her account of how she came to be with him is rejected, the same account cannot then be accepted on what happened after. A single narrative either carries the weight the law puts on it or it does not.

On 25 September 2026, in a judgment delivered by Justice Ujjal Bhuyan sitting with Justice Atul S. Chandurkar, the Supreme Court set aside a conviction under Section 376 of the Indian Penal Code that had been constructed in exactly that way — and said plainly why it could not stand.

Six days in June 2009

The prosecutrix, PW-1, was studying in class VIII at a government high school in Ludhiana. On the evening of 19 June 2009 she left home to buy provisions from a neighbourhood shop. On the way, on her account, she was stopped by the appellant, Paramjit Singh Bedi, who said he wanted her to meet his daughter — a friend of hers. She agreed, and got into his car, in which two boys were already sitting.

He took her to the LIG Flats in Ludhiana, where the two boys returned with the car. She said she was kept in the flat for two days. On 22 June he took her by scooter to Malerkotla and confined her in a room in an abandoned factory, where, she said, he had intercourse with her against her will, and threatened to kill her when she objected.

On 25 June they returned to Ludhiana. Walking from the railway station through Railway Colony No. 5, they were intercepted by her father (PW-2) and police officials. The appellant tried to flee, fell, and was apprehended. FIR No. 142 of 2009 followed at Ludhiana Division No. 5 police station under Sections 363, 366A and 376 IPC; the charge-sheet was under Sections 366 and 376.

Eleven prosecution witnesses were examined. On 1 June 2012 the Sessions Judge, Ludhiana acquitted the appellant under Section 366 and convicted him under Section 376, sentencing him to ten years’ rigorous imprisonment and a fine of ₹5,000. The Punjab and Haryana High Court dismissed his appeal on 12 September 2013. When the Supreme Court granted leave on 30 January 2015, he had already served almost six years of the ten, and was released on bail.

What the two charges required

The Court set out both provisions, because the appeal turned on how they related to each other.

Section 366 punishes kidnapping or abducting a woman with intent that she be compelled to marry against her will, or in order that she be forced or seduced to illicit intercourse. Kidnapping from lawful guardianship under Section 361 means taking or enticing a minor — under 18 in the case of a female — out of the keeping of the lawful guardian without that guardian’s consent. Abduction under Section 362 means compelling a person by force, or inducing her by deceitful means, to go from any place.

Section 376 as it stood before the 2013 amendment governed, the incident being from June 2009. Under Section 375 as it then stood, intercourse amounted to rape where it was against the woman’s will, or without her consent, or with consent obtained under fear or duress, or — with or without consent — where the woman was under sixteen.

Age therefore mattered twice over, and the finding on it went against the prosecution. The State argued from a school certificate that she was about fifteen, which would have made consent immaterial. But the radiologist who conducted the ossification test put her radiological age between seventeen and nineteen, said in cross-examination that she had seen no document of birth or age, and finally accepted that the girl might be more than eighteen but less than nineteen at the time of examination. The Sessions Judge, after examining the school material, held that the prosecution had failed to prove she was under eighteen, and proceeded on an age of nineteen.

Why the Sessions Judge acquitted on kidnapping

Having found her a major, the Sessions Judge examined her evidence on how she travelled. She had said the car journey to the LIG Flats passed through crowded bazaars and many brightly lit intersections. The scooter ride to Malerkotla took about an hour and a half through busy roads, crossing many lit intersections, with the appellant driving and her riding pillion. She did not get down when the scooter stopped. She did not try to run. She raised no hue and cry.

On that material the Sessions Judge held that if she had not consented to accompanying him, she could easily have alighted; that her having claimed to raise an alarm inside the room, while raising none on crowded streets, put a serious question mark over her credibility; and that the prosecution had miserably failed to prove the offence under Section 366. He acquitted the appellant of it.

The Supreme Court held that this analysis stood to reason. It also recorded a point of some importance: neither the State nor the informant had challenged those findings before the High Court, so the acquittal under Section 366, and the reasoning supporting it, had attained finality.

The contradiction, and how it was explained away

Having disbelieved her on the journey, the Sessions Judge accepted her on the assault. He relied on her statement that she had cried out in the room at Malerkotla with nobody near enough to hear; on her father’s evidence that she had gone missing and was recovered from the appellant’s company; on her aunt’s evidence (PW-3) that she had seen her in his company around the time; and on the medical evidence of PW-7 showing spermatozoa in the vaginal swab. Applying the last-seen-together theory, he concluded her account of rape was true.

He then put the contradiction to himself, and answered it with a proposition of his own. The findings might appear contradictory, he said, but the contradiction was not improbable — because “some daring women also choose to travel to far off places in the company of men”, and agreeing to accompany a man, even to spend a night with him, is consistent with not consenting to sex.

The High Court affirmed, going to Section 114A of the Evidence Act: where the prosecutrix denies consent, a presumption arises that she did not consent.

Where the reasoning broke

The Supreme Court’s answer was not that the proposition was wrong. It is right, and the Court said so. Consent to travel is not consent to intercourse, and a woman who goes willingly somewhere does not thereby consent to anything that happens there. That principle needed no defending.

But the proposition had been used to do something it cannot do: to repair a finding on credibility. The Sessions Judge had not accepted her evidence and then asked whether travelling willingly negatived consent to sex. He had rejected her evidence as unreliable, and then used the proposition to reinstate it for the second charge.

The Court stated the rule that follows. A conviction for rape can rest on the sole testimony of the prosecutrix — but only where that testimony inspires the confidence of the court. There cannot be partial rejection of her evidence for the purpose of Section 366 and partial acceptance of the very same statement to prove the charge under Section 376. If her evidence is of unimpeachable character it must be accepted in its entirety; there cannot be part acceptance and part rejection. It was for this reason, the Court explained, that it had analysed the material on the Section 366 charge at all, despite the acquittal on it — the two charges being intertwined on these facts.

On its own reading, the testimony was, in the Court’s phrase, a bundle of contradictions. She could not give the number or colour of the car, or the names of the two boys, and could not remember the date, month or year in which the case was registered. On the return journey she said in her examination-in-chief that they came by car and in cross-examination that they travelled by train, ticketless, in a crowded compartment — and raised no alarm either way. The presence of spermatozoa, the Court held, would not prove rape given the surrounding circumstances; it establishes intercourse, not absence of consent. And the appellant had also pointed to the absence of any internal or external injury, and to the recovery of her clothes from the dicky of the scooter.

The Court was careful about the boundary of its own finding. The appellant’s conduct may have been immoral and unethical, it said, but that by itself would not justify a conviction under Section 376 without clinching evidence. Such a charge must be proved on hard evidence and not on surmises and conjectures based on the value judgment of the presiding judge. Immorality of an act, absent credible evidence, cannot justify a conviction.

It also, in a single parenthesis, dealt with the phrase that had carried the trial court’s reasoning: the use of the word “daring” before “women” was, it said, totally uncalled for.

The background the defence had pressed

Mr. Rajiv Kataria for the appellant had argued false implication arising from a civil dispute: that PW-2 had borrowed ₹1,50,000 from the appellant and not repaid it, and had threatened to implicate him when pressed; and that the appellant was a tenant of one Major Singh, a relative of PW-2 — a relationship PW-2 sought to deny in evidence but which PW-3 admitted — with a civil suit pending over the tenanted premises. Ms. Nupur Kumar for the State of Punjab maintained that the conviction was fully justified, that the prosecutrix was a minor on the school certificate, and that the appellant had not discharged the burden under Section 114A.

The Court did not decide the case on the false-implication theory. It decided it on the internal coherence of the prosecution evidence, which is the narrower and more durable ground.

The order

The conviction and sentence under Section 376 IPC recorded by the Sessions Judge, Ludhiana on 1 June 2012 and affirmed by the High Court of Punjab and Haryana on 12 September 2013 were set aside, and the appellant was cleared of the charge. The criminal appeal was allowed.

The judgment is a narrow one in the best sense. It lays down no proposition about how the evidence of a prosecutrix is to be regarded in general, and it disturbs nothing about the sufficiency of her sole testimony, which remains a lawful basis for conviction. What it forbids is an artefact of reasoning — treating one witness as two, unreliable when the charge is kidnapping and reliable when the charge is rape — and filling the gap with the judge’s own view of how women behave. The cost of that method here was measured in years: six of them served before leave was granted, and seventeen from the FIR to an acquittal.