Sending abusive message on personal WhatsApp account not an offence: High Court [Read Judgment]

The Bombay HC Aurangabad bench on Saturday observed that sending abusive personal messages on WhatsApp willn't amount to utterance of obscene words in public place.

The court’s observation came as it quashed an First Information Report (FIR) against a petitioner under section 294 of Indian Penal Code (IPC), which provides punishment up to three-month imprisonment for obscene acts.

A division bench of justices Tanaji V Nalawade & Mukund G Sewlikar passed the order in a plea filed by the husband seeking to quash the First Information Report (FIR) filed against him by his wife before Nanded Police in Mar 2018.

The court held that WhatsApp messages sent on personal accounts are strictly personal & none has access to them except sender & receiver. Not even WhatsApp messenger provider can read these messages, the court said.

After examining WhatsApp security settings, the bench observed, “WhatsApp can't be a public place if messages are exchanged on personal accounts of two persons. If these messages had been posted on WhatsApp group, in that case the same could have been called as public place since members of the group will have access to those messages.”

The couple got married in May 2017. It was alleged that the petitioner husband did not treat his wife well & that he would beat & abuse her. It was further alleged that the petitioner married her for society’s sake as him being homosexual.

Opposing the plea, his wife’s advocate Kiran Nagarkar argued that the husband had called her up & abused her in filthy language. Thereafter, he sent abusive WhatsApp messages to her next month & had made phone calls to relatives.

The husband was booked in Mar 2018 for sending a WhatsApp message to wife calling her prostitute & that she earns money through it. The First Information Report (FIR) was lodged against him for criminal intimidation, defamation & outraging modesty of the woman.

Advocate Shambhuraje V Deshmukh for the petitioner, on the other hand, claimed that the First Information Report (FIR) couldn't be filed against his client since there was no utterance of abusive words in public place & therefore it should be quashed.

The court, however, held that the husband’s act falls under section 509 of Indian Penal Code which provides punishment for act intended to insult the modesty of the woman & granted liberty to Police to investigate the charges.

Justice Mukund G Sewlikar, who authored the judgment observed that “to call a woman, even if she is one’s own wife a prostitute & to call her that she earns money by indulging in prostitution amounts to insulting the modesty of a woman. Therefore, there is prima-facie evidence to indicate that the offence falls under Section 509 of Indian Penal Code.”

Source Link

Read Judgment Here:-