In Uttarakhand, the child sexual abuse law is being used to settle scores

In May 2021, a Nainital teenager’s neighbour filed a police complaint against him.

Ramnaresh Kashyap alleged that 18-year-old Pradeep Singh had taken his daughter away and had sexually assaulted her.

According to Kashyap, his daughter, Jaya, had left home on April 30, 2021, to attend the wedding of a relative. When she did not return, he suspected that she had been misled by Singh, who had taken her to his ancestral home in Moradabad, Uttar Pradesh. Jaya was five days shy of 18.

Investigating the complaint, the police claimed to have found Jaya at Singh’s home in Moradabad. They arrested him under provisions of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act.

Singh spent seven months in Uttarakhand’s Halwani jail.

But the case collapsed swiftly during trial.

Kashyap and his daughter denied everything. The father said that the complaint had been written by people of his village. Since he could not read, he did not know what it said and had simply signed it.

Jaya, on the other hand, claimed that she had not met Singh during her relative’s wedding and did not elope with him. The police had not found the two in Moradabad because they had never gone there, and Singh did not sexually assault her.

In December 2023, Singh was acquitted by a court in Haldwani. “I was framed in a wrong case because their [Jaya’s] family envied us for our financial well-being,” he told Scroll. “I didn't even know his [Kashyap’s] daughter.”

A wave of Pocso cases

Uttarakhand has reported a dramatic rise in cases filed under the Pocso Act in the last few years. Between 2016 and 2022, the Pocso crime rate has increased nearly four-fold.

However, the use of the stringent law by the Bharatiya Janata Party government in the state has raised several red flags. As Scroll reported earlier, advocates and police officials across the state said that most of the Pocso cases they handle do not stand judicial scrutiny. Worryingly, under the pressure of Hindu extremist groups, the police are using the law to target Muslim teens in interfaith relationships.

But it is not just teenage romance that has been criminalised. The police are accused of using the stringency of the law to settle personal scores and harass innocents.

‘I lost my job’

In March 2020, the Haldwani police arrested 28-year-old Tahir Hussain, a carpenter from Bareilly in Uttar Pradesh, on charges of molesting a minor by entering her home in Haldwani’s Banbhoolpura neighbourhood.

The FIR was lodged by a police official who was the minor’s uncle. Hussain was charged with Sections 7 and 8 of the Pocso Act, which pertain to sexual assault.

Hussain spent 14 months in jail and was granted bail by the Uttarakhand High Court in May 2021.

“I was on my way to work when I decided to urinate in a shrubbery by the road,” Hussain told Scroll. “As I was zipping up my pants, a girl from the police official’s house came out to clean the road. I turned away and walked off.”

Hussain said he had not entered the house or even touched the girl. But as he made his way to work, the police official grabbed him and started beating him up. “He said that I had made lewd gestures towards the girl,” he said. “I was lodged at the Haldwani jail where I met several others who said that they had been wrongly framed by this police officer, who had been an SHO [station house officer] at several police stations in Nainital district.”

The court came to a similar conclusion. Thanks to a CCTV camera outside the minor’s house, Pocso judge Nandan Singh studied the footage and noted that Hussain’s version of events were true. In August 2023, he was acquitted.

In a scathing verdict, judge Singh noted how police officials had fabricated the investigation to frame Hussain. “The entire prosecution story appears to be an illegal assistance by the police department to its employee,” read the verdict. “Such a thing cannot be expected from the investigator. Even when the CCTV footage was seen by the investigator, a wrong chargesheet has been presented against the accused. It also appears that the investigator has not discharged his duties legally.”

Hussain told Scroll that a favourable verdict cannot undo the damage. “I had been married just a year before I was arrested,” he said. “I had family responsibilities and I lost my job because of the case. My family spent more than Rs 1 lakh in legal fees.”

A high acquittal rate

These cases are not an exception.

Scroll’s analysis of Pocso cases tried in the Dehradun district court between 2016 and 2023 shows that the acquittal rate in these cases has steadily increased since 2019. In 2023, the acquittal rate stood at 95%.

In Haldwani, the Mukhani police station averages one Pocso case a month. The station house officer, Pankaj Joshi, admitted, “Most of these cases are fake and they do not stand in court.”

He deflected blame for the false cases on the complainants, who he said were usually the families of “young couples who elope”.

He pointed out that social media had made it easier for youngsters to interact across community boundaries – one of the common explanations that most police officials, even lawyers, interviewed by Scroll gave for the rise in Pocso cases in the state.

But that does not explain why the rise in cases is sharper in Uttarakhand compared to neighbouring Uttar Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh.

Another reason commonly given by police officials centred around the increase in the migrant labour population from other states. “The children in migrant families here are very prone to eloping,” claimed Ashok Kumar, special sub-inspector at the Rudrapur police station in Udhampur Singh Nagar district. “They do not receive the care of their parents, who are out working most of the time.” The police station has registered 13 Pocso cases till July 2024, according to Kumar. “We register elopements as Pocso cases because there is greater sensitivity about the rights of minors in the state.”

Malika Virdi, an activist with the Uttarakhand Mahila Manch, told Scroll that migrant workers in the hill state do not just come from neighbouring states, but also from its own mountain villages. “How would one differentiate between the two? I do not agree with this explanation. The migrant labour from other states are easy targets because the ‘outsider’ tag is a convenient way to target them,” she said.

A senior member of the Uttarakhand Commission for Protection of Child Rights, however, chose to fall back on social conservatism to explain the rise in cases.

“Back in the day, girls were told that they are devi ka swaroop,” said the member, meaning that they have the form of a goddess. “But girls are no longer being taught sanskar by their parents. They have become aggressive thanks to premature titillation on social media, drug abuse, and that idiotic feminism. It is leading to sexual misadventures.”

This is the second part of a series.

Also read: How Uttarakhand made teenage romance dangerous – especially for Muslims